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DVAN, The New School, Poets & Writers, and The Brooklyn Rail, with support from Asian American Writer's Workshop (AAWW) and the Authors Guild Foundation proudly presenting The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers of the Diaspora, at the Rizzoli Bookstore. This special event marks the launch of an anthology edited by scholars Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen.
In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, the event celebrates the voices of the Vietnamese diaspora through intimate dialogues in The Cleaving, featuring writers from across the globe. The anthology explores themes of identity, belonging, creativity, and resilience through conversations about family history, legacies of colonialism and militarism, and the writers' own artistic and literary achievements.
The evening will feature readings and discussions by editors and contributors, including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Lan Duong, Cathy Linh Che, Monique Truong, and Isabelle Thuy Pelaud. Co-organized by the Arts Writing concentration of The New School’s MFA Program, a private reception will follow, with brief remarks from sponsors and community members, as well as refreshments at The New School.
This reception will also celebrate the publication of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s To Save and To Destroy (Harvard University Press), based on his Norton Lectures at Harvard University.
The private reception will feature Vietnamese Chocolate by Chi Bui.
Please join us for a night of readings, conversation, and community as we honor the extraordinary contributions of diasporic Vietnamese writers.
Presented by Literary Studies, School of Media Studies, Art and Design History and Theory, Sociology, Schools of Public Engagement, The Faculty Center, The Provost Office and DVAN, The Brooklyn Rail, The Authors Guild Foundation, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Rizzoli Bookstore, University of California Press, Harvard University Press. This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Lan Duong is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism, coeditor of Troubling Borders: Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora, and cowriter of Departures: An Introduction. Dr. Duong’s second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory, examines Vietnamese films across history and across several institutional and community-oriented sites.
Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is a professor at SF State University interested in the role of race and war in shaping identity and cultural productions. She wrote the very first book on Vietnamese American literature titled This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature and co-edited the award winning book Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer and of Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nguyen is Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the first Asian American member of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books) and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival.
Born in Saigon, South Vietnam (now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), Monique Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She’s a novelist, essayist, children’s picture book author, and librettist. Her novels are The Sweetest Fruits (Viking, 2019), Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), and the national bestseller The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). Her children’s picture book Mai’s Áo Dài (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2025) is co-written with Thai Nguyen and illustrated by Dung Ho.
Photo by Haruka Sakaguchi.
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Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books) and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival.
Lan Duong is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism, coeditor of Troubling Borders: Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora, and cowriter of Departures: An Introduction. Dr. Duong’s second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory, examines Vietnamese films across history and across several institutional and community-oriented sites. Her book of poems, Nothing Follows, was published by Texas Tech University Press in 2023. She is a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (www.criticalrefugeestudies.com).
Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer and of Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nguyen is Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the first Asian American member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. Born in Vietnam, Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee with his parents and grew up in San Jose, CA, where his family opened the city’s second Vietnamese grocery store. He lives in Pasadena, CA. His most revent book is TO SAVE AND TO DESTROY: Writing as an other.
Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is a professor at SF State University interested in the role of race and war in shaping identity and cultural productions. She wrote the very first book on Vietnamese American literature titled This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature and co-edited the award winning book Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora. After growing up in France, she moved to the United States where she earned her doctorate from UC Berkeley and spent her career identifying the unique barriers facing Vietnamese American writers prior and after writing a book. Her academic work has been featured in The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, Themes in Contemporary North American Fiction, Journal of Asian American Studies, The Asian American Literary Review, Amerasia Journal, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is now working on her creative writing.
As an Ethnic Studies Scholar, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud devoted her life to rectifying the systemic and cultural barriers she identified in her scholarships. To this aim, she co-founded with Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen a non-profit organization called the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN.org). For almost two decades Nguyen and Pelaud created, through this organization, opportunities for diasporic Vietnamese writers to be nurtured and empowered, and for their work to be more visible. In three years for exemple, they helped publish 18 books. Their last book The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora that they co-edited with Lan Duong is the direct result of their activist and academic works. This collection of dialogues shows with utmost clarity that their fight is absolutely needed and is highly relevant to American culture.
Born in Saigon, South Vietnam (now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), Monique Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She’s a novelist, essayist, children’s picture book author, and librettist. Her novels are The Sweetest Fruits (Viking, 2019), Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), and the national bestseller The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). Her children’s picture book Mai’s Áo Dài (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2025) is co-written with Thai Nguyen and illustrated by Dung Ho. Along with Barbara Tran and Khoi Luu, she’s a contributing co-editor of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition (Texas Tech University Press/DVAN Series, 2023). A graduate of Yale College and Columbia Law School, she’s a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship, Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, Bard Fiction Prize, and John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, among other honors.