Watermark: Vietnamese Poetry & Prose Book Launch and Celebration

You're invited to celebrate the release of Watermark: Vietnamese Poetry & Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition.

25 years ago, Watermark: Vietnamese Poetry & Prose was published by the Asian American Writers' Workshop. A work both foundational and pathbreaking, Watermark provided a platform for Vietnamese writers to share authentic and personal narratives. Now, in 2023, a 25th anniversary edition is being released and we would love for you to celebrate with us!

Join us for an evening of poetry and prose with readers: Hoa Nguyen, maura nguyen donohue, Vi Khi Nao and Watermark editors: Barbara Tran, Monique Truong, and Khoi Luu.

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of its publication, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and Texas Tech University Press are proud to release a newly updated version of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, the seminal anthology of Vietnamese American literature. Contextualized by a new foreword from Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and seasoned with new voices, Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition takes its place as a generational work of eclectic and essential voices.

Edited by Barbara Tran, Monique Truong, and Khoi Luu, this updated edition of Watermark continues to center Vietnamese American literature, whose emergence it celebrated upon its initial publication in 1998. Again, some of the most innovative contemporary Vietnamese American writers, such as Truong Tran, lê thị diễm thúy, and Dao Strom, explore thematic and stylistic territory previously overlooked in other collections, which have traditionally focused on war. New voices such as Nam Le, Anvi Hoàng, and Vinh Nguyen are included in this new edition, raising the number of pieces from forty to fifty-four.

Watermark lifts all constraints, leaving the works to reset the boundaries for themselves. And they do—using poetry, fiction, and experimental forms to venture further into the intricacies of the Vietnamese American psyche. A work equal measures foundational and pathbreaking, now available again for a new generation of readers—an essential collection not to be missed.

Hoa Nguyen is a poet, educator, and member of She Who Has No Masters, a project of multi-voiced collectivity and hybrid poetics of the Vietnamese diaspora. Her books include Red Juice, the Griffin Prize-nominated Violet Energy Ingots, and A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, a finalist for the National Book Award and the General Governor’s Literary Award. She’s an Aquarius and a Fire Horse.

maura nguyen donohue is Director, MFA/Dance at Hunter College. Her recent accolades and projects include: Carrying the Torch: Trojan Women Re-finding the Groove Scholar & Feminist Online and reclamation of the disposable DSA’s Dancing in the Aftermath of Anti-Asian Hate. She’s written for Danspace Project, Gibney, Women & Performance, Culturebot, American Theater, Dance Magazine, the Dance Insider, MR’s Performance Journal and MANCC.

VI KHI NAO is the author of seven poetry collections & of the short story collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Swimming with Dead Stars. Her poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. Her book, Suicide: the Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche is out of 11:11 in Spring 2023. The Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute, her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She was the 2022 recipient of the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize.

Barbara Tran’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Malahat Review, and Conjunctions. Author of the narration for Madame Pirate: Becoming a Legend, in competition in XR at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, Barbara is currently at work on the screenplay for Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s forthcoming feature film, Visions in the Dark. A poetry collection, Precedented Parroting, is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in February 2024.

Monique Truong is a novelist, essayist, librettist, and author with Thai Nguyen of Mai’s Áo Dài, a children’s picture book illustrated by Dung Ho (forthcoming in 2024 from Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books). Truong's novels are The Sweetest Fruits (2019), Bitter in the Mouth (2010), and The Book of Salt (2003). A graduate of Yale College and Columbia School of Law, she’s received a Guggenheim Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, and John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, among other honors.

Khoi Luu was born in Saigon, raised outside Chicago, and lives in New York City. His fiction has appeared in anthologies such as the Việt Nam Forum, Văn Học, and Best New American Voices. He’s one of seven American authors whose works comprise a nationwide literature curriculum, developed by Annenberg Learner and PBS, for middle-school students. He was educated at Harvard, received his MA in creative writing from Boston University, and has been in residence at Yaddo.

ASIAN AMERICAN WRITERS' WORKSHOP:

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Texas Tech University Press

1969 Gallery

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Host or Publisher The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN)