Organizer: McNally Jackson Independent Booksellers and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop

Type/Location: In Person / New York, NY

Description:

Join the Asian American Writers’ Workshop for a talk by Mai Der Vang, recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and professor of Creative Writing at Fresno State University, who will discuss her new poetry book on the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities. Topics covered by Mai Der Vang include the ongoing cultural and environmental repercussions of the war in Vietnam, the lives of refugees afterward, and the postmemory carried by their descendants. Cambodian American poet and instructor at Barnard College Monica Sok will moderate the discussion.

About the Book:

Mai Der Vang’s poetry—lyrically insistent and visually compelling—constitutes a groundbreaking investigation into the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities, the ongoing cultural and environmental repercussions of the war in Vietnam, the lives of refugees afterward, and the postmemory carried by their descendants. Primordial is a crucial turn to the ecological and generational impact of violence, a powerful and rousing meditation on climate, origin, and fate.

With profound and attentive care, Vang addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam. The saola looks like an antelope, with two long horns, and is related to wild cattle, though the saola has been placed in a genus of its own. Remarkably, the saola has only been known to the outside world since 1992, and sightings are so rare that it has now been more than a decade since the last known image of one was captured in a camera trap photo in 2013.

Primordial examines the saola’s relationship to Hmong refugee identity and cosmology and a shared sense of exile, precarity, privacy, and survival. Can a war-torn landscape and memory provide sanctuary, and what are the consequences for our climate, our origins, our ability to belong to a homeland? Written during a difficult pregnancy and postpartum period, Vang’s poems are urgent stays against extinction.

“A testament to the interconnectedness of life across species and generations, and to the power of spirit, Mai Der Vang’s Primordial adapts the lyricism of her first book, Afterland, and the documentarian gaze of her previous book, Yellow Rain, to poetically present that which binds. Relational, vulnerable, and elegantly woven, Vang’s poems animate the endangered saola alongside the resilience of the Hmong people, juxtaposing the origins of life with the legacies we leave behind. In its honoring of the vulnerability and strength of motherhood, this book is a reminder that our survival is intertwined with the natural world at large, and a call to protect both.”—Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

About the Speakers:

Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and a Northern California Book Award. Yellow Rain was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the California Book Award. Her first book, Afterland, received the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Fresno State.

Monica Sok is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and Year Zero, winner of a 2015 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship 30 and Under, selected by Marilyn Chin. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at New York University and was recognized with a 2018 92Y Discovery Prize. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Hedgebrook, Jerome Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, National Endowment of the Arts, Saltonstall Foundation, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Sok was a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and a teaching artist at the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, California where she taught poetry to Southeast Asian youths. She lives in New York City and teaches at Barnard College at Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in The Believer, Paris Review, POETRY, New England Review, and the Washington Post, among others.

Registration:

To attend the event in person, please register here.