T186.
Writing Home: Using Family & Regional History to (Re)Connect with Our Roots
Thursday, March 24, 2022
12:10 pm to 1:10 pm
As recent events have demonstrated, Asian Americans are seen as perpetual foreigners in the US. Yet, owing to complicated reasons around migration, many of us also feel like foreigners in our countries of origin. We are five Asian American writers who have all sought to (re)connect with our cultural roots through writing about family and/or regional histories. In this panel, we read from our works and discuss how we use history to inform our fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Participants
Rita Chang-Eppig received her MFA from NYU. Her stories have appeared/are forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Steinbeck Center at SJSU.
Susan Ito coedited the anthology A Ghost At Heart's Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption. She is author of the memoir The Mouse Room. She is a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto and on faculty at Mills College and BayPath University's MFA programs.
Jerome Blanco received his MFA from New York University, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Literary Hub, Southern Humanities Review, Emrys Journal, the Margins, and elsewhere.
Preeti Vangani is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize, winner of the RL India Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and Cortland Review. A graduate of University of South Florida's MFA program, she has received fellowships from PEN America, UCross, and Center for Cultural Innovation.
Zora Mai Quỳnh is a Vietnamese American writer who has been published in Ploughshares, Kweli, and Strange Horizons. They are the winner of the 2021 SF Foundation Nomadic Press Literary Award. Zora is a contributing writer with diaCRITICS. Visit Zora: zmquynh.com and @zmquynh.
