Join us to celebrate the launch of The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora, the first and only book to gather the voices and perspectives of Vietnamese diasporic authors from across the globe, with Viet Thanh Nguyen, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, and Doan Bui.
The Cleaving brings together Vietnamese artists and writers from around the world in conversation about their craft and how their work has been shaped and received by mainstream culture and their own communities. This collection highlights how Vietnamese diasporic writers speak about having been cleaved—a condition in which they have been separated from, yet still hew to, the country that they have left behind.
Composed of eighteen dialogues among thirty-seven writers from France, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, Australia, Israel, and the United States, the book expands on the many lives that Vietnamese writers inhabit. The dialogues touch on family history, legacies of colonialism and militarism, and the writers' own artistic and literary achievements. Taken together, these conversations insist on a deeper reckoning with the conditions of displacement.
About the Speakers
Editors
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, The Refugees, The Committed, and Simone. He co-authored Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book, with his then six-year-old son, Ellison, and is the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston. His next book is To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2025. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.
Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). She is also a member of the organization’s Editorial Committee. Isabelle is a Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. Isabelle is the author of This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literatureand numerous academic essays. She co-edited Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora and The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora from UC Press. Isabelle received a BA in Cultural Anthropology and a PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.
Lan Duong is 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 Texas Tech UP in 2023.
Contributors
Born and raised in Vietnam, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is the author of thirteen books in Vietnamese and English, most recently the global bestselling novels The Mountains Sing and Dust Child, and the poetry collection The Color of Peace. Her writing has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and has received Runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the International Book Award, the BookBrowse Best Debut Award, as well as the Lannan Literary Fellowship in Fiction. She is the translator of eight books and was named by Forbes Việt Nam as one of 20 inspiring women of 2021. She has a Ph.D in Creative Writing. For more information: www.nguyenphanquemai.com
Doan Bui is a writer and journalist. She was awarded the Prix Albert Londres for her work about refugees. Her memoir, Le silence de mon père (2016) won Prix de la porte Dorée. Her most recent works are La Tour, a fiction novel (2022) shortlisted for Goncourt premier roman, and the Femina shortlisted Le Monde de Nulle part (2024). Both are tribute to George Perec and Vietnam (why not?). She wrote with Ukrainian writers Pavlo and Viktoria Matyusha Lettres d’amour et de Guerre (2023) and wrote scenarios for graphic novels. She also composes music for artistic performances, and loves to karaoke in Vietnamese.
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