About this Event
DVAN, The New School, Poets & Writers, and The Brooklyn Rail, with support from the Authors' Guild and AAWW, present Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with Cathy Linh Che, Lan Duong, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, and Monique Truong.
Fifty years since the Fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War, our panel will discuss two new books about the legacies of displacement and creativity that have profoundly shaped Vietnamese communities worldwide. The Cleaving is an unprecedented collection edited by Pelaud, Duong, and Nguyen, featuring 37 Vietnamese writers on their complex ties to their homeland. To Save and To Destroy: Writing As An Other is a deeply personal and analytical meditation by Viet Thanh Nguyen on the role of literature in shaping solidarity and addressing historical wounds.
PLEASE NOTE:
- This event is mixed seated/standing. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served.
- RSVP is encouraged but not required.
- Doors open at 6 pm.
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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.
Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of (Washington Square Press, 2025), (Alice James Books) and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book (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.
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.
The first and only book to gather the voices and perspectives of Vietnamese diasporic authors from across the globe.
Edited by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan P. Duong, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, 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.
Featured writers: Hoai Huong Aubert-Nguyen, Amy Quan Barry, Doan Bui, Thi Bui, Lan Cao, Cathy Linh Che, André Dao, Duy Đoàn, Lan P. Duong, Dương Vân Mai Elliott, Le Ly Hayslip, Matt Huynh, Violet Kupersmith, Thanhhà Lại, Vincent Lam, T.K. Lê, Tracey Lien, Marcelino Trương Lực , Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Anna Möi, Beth (Bich) Minh Nguyen, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Hoa Nguyen, Philip Nguyễn, Thảo Nguyễn, Vaan Nguyen, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Andrew X. Pham, Aimee Phan, Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood, Bao Phi, Dao Strom, Kim Thúy, Paul Tran, Monique Truong, Minh Huynh Vu, Ocean Vuong
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (now an HBO series) comes a moving and unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness and a bold call for expansive political solidarity.
Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking M**der of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans.
The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing? Over the course of six captivating and moving chapters, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are, by turns, literary, historical, political, and familial.
Each piece moves between writers who influenced Nguyen’s craft and weaves in the haunting story of his late mother’s mental illness. Nguyen unfolds the novels and nonfiction of Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, and Maxine Hong Kingston, until aesthetic theories give way to pressing concerns raised by war and politics. What is a writer’s responsibility in a time of violence? Should we celebrate fiction that gives voice to the voiceless—or do we confront the forces that render millions voiceless in the first place? What are the burdens and pleasures of the “minor” writer in any society? Unsatisfied with the modest inclusion accorded to “model minorities” such as Asian Americans, Nguyen sets the agenda for a more radical and disquieting solidarity with those whose lives have been devastated by imperialism and forever wars.
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.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway, New York, United States
USD 0.00
