It seems that every Asian-American has at one time brought an ethnic home-cooked meal to school and experienced alienation in the school lunchroom. It has become part of our collective lore and a common memory/experience for us to connect over. But just as repeating a word over and over causes it to lose meaning, repeating an iteration of a story over and over causes it to lose its efficacy. In this workshop, we will explore how to make meaning from these memories, to turn our recollections into compelling narratives that refuse to get lost in the multitudes.

Kimberly Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American diaspora poet originally from Omaha, Nebraska but now living in New York City. Her work can be found in diaCRITICS, Muzzle Magazine, The Minnesota Review, The Journal and others. She was a recipient of a Beatrice Daw Brown Prize, and she was a finalist for Frontier Poetry’s 2021 OPEN and New Poets Awards and Palette Poetry’s 2021 Previously Published Poem Prize. She was a 2021 Emerging Voices Fellow at PEN America and is currently a 2022-2023 Poetry Coalition Fellow.

This event is in collaboration with AASU with support from the SEE