From History to Poetry: Mai Der Vang Explores the Archival Record in Her Celebrated Volume "Yellow Rain"

Washington, D.C., June 27, 2022 – In a remarkable example of transforming the mundane into high art, poet Mai Der Vang, daughter of Hmong refugees and finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, pored through thousands of pages of declassified documents from the collections of the National Security Archive and other sources to find material for her poems, whose purpose is to record and vivify the trauma experienced by the Hmong people during the Secret War in Laos of the 1960s and 1970s.

Vang’s new volume is called Yellow Rain, a reference to the mysterious, lethal substance whose existence the Hmong began to report in the late 1970s, after the American withdrawal from Indochina.  During the Vietnam War, the United States had relied on Hmong tribesmen in their fight against the Communists, then faced widespread condemnation for abandoning them to the mercy of the victorious Vietnamese and Pathet Lao regimes after the U.S. military pulled out. 

Read more here on National Security Archives.