You are invited to our spring Perspectives: Writers on Migration event! Perspectives is a series of conversations with writers across genres, discussing the experience of migration, leaving one's home, and building a new one.

On May 20, at 7:00pm please join us as we speak with Sun Yung Shin, editor of the new anthology What We Hunger For: Refugee & Immigrant Stories About Food and Family, and Roy G. Guzmán and Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay, two of the anthology’s contributors. We will be discussing their complicated, poignant, funny, difficult, joyful, and ongoing relationships to food, cooking, and eating.

We are thrilled to host Sun Yung, Saymoukda, and Roy! We would love to see all of you at this event, and your friends and families too! Find more info and register through the link below.

Cover by Pader Fang

Thursday, May 20, 2021

7:00pm CST

Zoom Meeting Link will be sent after registration.

RSVP by Wednesday, May 19

We also invite you to join us in making “Lao Beef Jerky” from Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay’s piece “The Summer of Lao Beef Jerky at Rivoli.”

Recipe

Meet 신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin, the editor of What We Hunger For: Refugee & Immigrant Stories About Food and Family, featured in our spring Perspectives: Writers on Migration event. Sun Yung was born in Seoul, Korea, during 박 정 희 Park Chung-ee's military dictatorship, and grew up in the Chicago area. She is also the editor of the best-selling anthology A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. She is the author of poetry collections The Wet Hex (2022), Unbearable Splendor (finalist for the 2017 PEN USA Literary Award for Poetry, winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for poetry); Rough, and Savage; and

Skirt Full of Black (winner of the 2007 Asian American Literary Award for poetry), co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and author of bilingual illustrated book for children Cooper’s Lesson and the coauthor with John Coy, Shannon Gibney, and Diane Wilson of Where We Come From, an illustrated book for children (2022). She is also a craniosacral therapist and lives in Minneapolis where she co-directs the community organization Poetry Asylum with poet Su Hwang. Find her jewelry at Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center.

Photo of Saymoukda by John Schaidler

Meet Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay a contributor in What We Hunger For. Saymoukda is a Lao American poet and playwright. Her poetry appears in journals, magazines, anthologies, and more. Her plays have been presented by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Theater Mu, Lower Depth Theatre, and other venues. She is a 2020–23 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation National Playwright in Residence.

Meet Roy G. Guzmán a contributor in What We Hunger For. Saymoukda is a Lao American poet and playwright. Roy is the author of Catrachos (Graywolf Press, 2020) and the chapbook Restored Mural for Orlando (Queerodactyl Press, 2016). A 2019 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, they are an adjunct instructor and a PhD candidate in cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

Photo of Roy by Kai Coggin