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Pulitzer Prize finalist Mai Der Vang in conversation with Chaun Webster about PrimordialThursday, March 6, 2024, 7:00 p.m.
East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier Street, Saint Paul, MN
books for sale from SubText Bookstore
Free event. Registration is encouraged! https://eastsidefreedomlibrary.app.neoncrm.com/event.jsp?event=265&
Pulitzer Prize finalist Mai Der Vang will be joined by poet and scholar Chaun Webster for a reading and conversation of her new collection of poetry, Primordial. In this new collection, Vang addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam, as a vehicle to investigate 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.
Vang’s work is lyrically insistent and visually compelling as she 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.
She will be in conversation with Chaun Webster.
Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain, a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and Afterland, winner of the First Book Award of the Academy of American Poets. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, her poetry has appeared in Tin House, the American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.
Chaun Webster is a poet and graphic designer living in Minneapolis whose work is attempting to put pressure on the spatial and temporal limitations of writing, of the English language, as a way to demonstrate its incapacity for describing blackness outside of a regime of death and dying. Webster’s books include, Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime published by Noemi Press in 2018, and Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world, published by Black Ocean in 2023. Both books were awarded the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry.
This event is free and open for the cause of solidarity. (Registration is encouraged.)
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
1105 Greenbrier St, Saint Paul, MN, United States, Minnesota 55106
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