T129.
Grieving in the Asian Diaspora
Thursday, March 9, 2023
9:00 am to 10:15 am
This panel shines a light on the difficult—and sometimes hidden—work of grieving. Can writing help us process grief? Is grief specific to families, to cultures, to languages? A distinguished panel of writers whose work includes award-winning novels, memoirs, poetry collections, short stories, essays, and books on craft discuss the process of grieving as adoptees, as the children of immigrants, as citizens of a troubled country, and as inhabitants of a planet in the midst of irreversible change.
Participants
Chris Santiago is a poet and fiction writer and the author of Tula, winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. A Kundiman, Mellon/ACLS, and McKnight Writing Fellow, he is associate professor of English at the University of St. Thomas.
Sequoia Nagamatsu (@SequoiaN) is the author of the national bestselling novel, How High We Go in the Dark, and the story collection, Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone. He teaches creative writing at St. Olaf College and in the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA program.
Victoria Chang's latest poetry books are The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon, 2022) and OBIT (Copper Canyon, 2020). Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief was published by Milkweed in 2001. She lives in L.A. and teaches within Antioch's MFA program.
Sejal Shah’s debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance (UGA Press), was named an NPR Best Book of 2020 and a finalist for the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award in nonfiction. Her forthcoming short story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry, will be published in 2024.
