S176.
Writing Ourselves into Existence: Taiwanese American Voices
Saturday, March 26, 2022
12:10 pm to 1:10 pm
Taiwan is the twentieth-largest economy in the world and a modern democracy, but it is blocked from membership in the United Nations and World Health Organization and can’t even compete in the Olympics under its own name. China thwarts Taiwan’s sovereignty not just through diplomacy but through language, by censoring perceived dissent and controlling the narrative. Taiwanese American writers can tell their stories from a safe distance; their words are urgent and necessary to counteract this erasure.
Participants
Grace Loh Prasad received her MFA in creative writing from Mills College and is an alumna of VONA. Her essays have appeared in Catapult, Ninth Letter, The Manifest-Station, Cha, and Hedgebrook Journal. She is currently working on a memoir/essay collection entitled "The Translator’s Daughter."
Yi Shun Lai is the author of two books, and a columnist at The Writer magazine. Her work appears in Brevity and Electric Lit of late and she teaches in the MFA program at Bay Path University. She is a diversity, equity, inclusion, and access educator for CanIPlayThat.com.
Grace Hwang Lynch is a journalist and essayist whose work has been published by Tin House, Catapult, and NPR. The anthologies Lavanderia: A Mixed Load of Women, Wash and Word and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting have included her work. She is writing a memoir.
Lisa Chiu is a writer whose work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, People magazine, and anthologies including Cheers to Muses: Contemporary Works by Asian American Women and Who’s Your Mama?: The Unsung Voices of Women and Mothers. She is currently working on a memoir, Hungry Ghost.
