DVAN Reading Series | Then and Now: Vietnamese American Literature

DVAN is thrilled to host writers Angie Chau, Lan Duong, Carolyn Huynh, Anastasia Doan Trinh Le, Frank Thanh Nguyen, and Hieu Minh Nguyen in our summer reading event at Green Apple Books on the Park! The evening will be filled with explorations of the shift in narratives in Vietnamese American literature from different generations of Vietnamese American writers. Join us for an exciting evening of poetry, memoir and fiction!

This event is FREE, but space is limited. Please RSVP to ensure your seat.

If you'd like to request special accommodations, please email us at [email protected].

ANGIE CHAU is the author of Quiet As They Come. Described by Sandra Cisneros as, “Heartbreaking tales of ordinary people lost between the extraordinary circumstances of history. Bitter and beautiful all at once.” This collection tracks the breaking asunder of an extended Vietnamese family newly arrived in California in the 1970s as they attempt to define home in their new lives as exiles. Her work has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Ajar Journal, Indiana Review, Diacritics, Santa Clara Review, Night Train Magazine, and the Heyday Books anthology, New California Writing. She has been awarded a Hedgebrook Residency, a Djerassi Residency, an Anderson Center Residency, and a Macondo Foundation Fellowship. She won the UC Davis Maurice Prize in Fiction and was a Walter W. Stiern Library Writer in Residence. She has resided in Vietnam, Malaysia, Italy, Spain, and Hawaii. She is currently based in the Bay Area and is at work on a novel.

LAN DUONG is an Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her poetry has appeared in the journals Oberon and Spoon River Review as well as the anthologies Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose and Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing. Her debut collection of poetry, Nothing Follows, was published by TTU in 2023.

CAROLYN HUYNH loves writing about messy Asian women who never learn from their mistakes. After living up and down the West Coast, she now resides in Los Angeles with her partner and her chaotic dog. When she's not writing, Carolyn daydreams about having iced coffee on a rooftop in Sài Gòn. The Fortunes of Jaded Women is her debut novel and was a Good Morning America book club pick and selected as one of the best books of 2022 by NPR. Her sophomore book, The Family Recipe, comes out from Atria in 2025.

ANASTASIA LÊ is a Vietnamese American poet & book artist working from the archive. Their work has been supported by the Queer Archives Residency at the SF Public Library, the Bernice Bing: Open Call at the Asian Art Museum, and the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center. You can find their poetry lovingly published by the great people at The Ana. Anastasia is an MFA student in creative writing at SF State, where they self-publish under the imprint B!NGO Press. Their favorite color is red.

FRANK THANH NGUYEN was born in Dalat and grew up in Saigon, Vietnam. After the fall of Saigon to the Communists in 1975, he escaped the country, got arrested, and was sent to labor camps. In 1981, he was released and successfully escaped again to reunite with his family in the US. He earned his master’s degree in computer science and worked for many high-tech companies in California. He is married and has two sons. Frank Nguyen spends much of his spare time reading, writing, and playing music.

HIEU MINH NGUYEN is the author of two collections of poetry,This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), which went on to win the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. Some awards and fellowships Hieu has received include: the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a McKnight Writing Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Hieu lives in Oakland and is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.

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Host or Publisher The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN)