About
Dao Strom is a poet, musician, writer, and interdisciplinary artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author/composer of several hybrid-literary works, including the poetry-art collection, INSTRUMENT, and its musical companion of song-poems, TRAVELER’S ODE, and the forthcoming TENDER REVOLUTIONS/YELLOW SONGS (2025). She co-edited/co-curated the hybrid-literary anthology + exhibit A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS (2024). Strom’s work encompasses both solo and collaborative art and writing projects, and has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, NEA, Oregon Community Foundation, and others. Born in Vietnam, Strom now lives in Portland, Oregon.
Born in Vietnam, Dao Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California and is based now in Portland, Oregon. She published her first novel, Grass Roof/Tin Roof (Mariner Books), in 2003, and released her first album, Send Me Home, in 2004, which was profiled in the alt-country music magazine No Depression. Her second book of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press), was published in 2006, and reissued in 2019 with a new foreword and introduction. Strom’s first hybrid project, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, an experimental memoir and song-cycle, East/West, was self-released in 2015. She is the author of You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, a bilingual poetry-art collection published by AJAR Press, a Hanoi-based independent publisher. Her second poetry-art collection, Instrument, was published by Portland-based poetry label-and-press Fonograf Editions, and won the 2022 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry. The book’s musical companion, Traveler’s Ode, was released by Antiquated Future Records, which also released her 2022 album of ambient-folk songs, Redux. Strom’s forthcoming 2025 project, Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs, will be a joint release by Pacific Northwest indie labels and publishers, The 3rd Thing Press, Antiquated Future Records, and Beacon Sound. Strom’s works also include music/poetry performance, public art, and visual-poetry installations.
Since 2015, Strom has been a founding member of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of womxn and nonbinary writers of the Vietnamese diaspora who engage in collaborative, polyvocal, and hybrid-poetic works to enact a politics of connection across diasporic boundaries. She Who Has No Master(s) has published poems in Poetry, BOMB, Prism International, and been awarded residencies at The Studios at Mass MoCA and Djerassi Resident Artists Program. In 2025, She Who Has No Master(s) will present hybrid-poetry art and performance in collaboration with the international artists collective Moving Poets at Novilla (Berlin, Germany).
Strom is also the co-founder of De-Canon, which initiated in 2017 as a “pop-up library” installation and social art experiment centering works/books by writers of color. de-canon’s projects seek to challenge precepts and perceptions of reading and writing. In 2024, Strom co-edited and co-curated (with Jyothi Natarajan) A Mouth Holds Many Things, a hybrid-literary collection featuring works by 36 women and nonbinary writer-artists, a collaborative publication of Fonograf Editions and de-canon; accompanied by a group art exhibition at Stelo Arts (Summer, 2024). For de-canon, Strom curated collaborative poetry for the public artwork, Reconfigurations, in Mount Tabor Park in Portland, Oregon.
Strom’s work has received a Creative Capital Artist Award, a Creative Heights Grant (Oregon Community Foundation), an Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship, a National Endowment for Literature Fellowship, and arts grants from the Ford Foundation and Precipice Fund/Warhol Foundation, among other recognitions.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Strom teaches with the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing and facilitates the She Who Has No Master(s) Mentorship Program.
+ Contact: herandthesea@gmail.com
+ substack: tender revolutions
+ bluesky: @daostrom
+ IG: @herandthesea |
UPCOMING / RECENT
2025
April 2, 7pm: Wild Nights EP Release Show, Turn!Turn!Turn!, Portland, OR. Music collaboration with Dao Strom & Alicia Jo Rabins; readings by Danielle Frandina, Emily Kendal Frey, Sara Jaffe, Jennifer Perrine, Chrys Tobey.
Music Release: Wild Nights, by Dao Strom & Alicia Jo Rabins; a 6-song EP of country/ambient songs.
ARTIST STATEMENT
In considering “voice”, or that which seeks to be voiced, as an immateriality that cannot be contained or definitively conveyed via any one body—any single medium or context—my work concerns itself with the necessity of polyvocality and mutability, in terms both of content and form. This uncontainability, characteristic of hybrid and diasporic identities, lends itself also to a contemplation of fragments and fragmentation—of/within selves, histories, cultures, groups of people, and places.
My primary material is language—which may articulate as arrangements of poetry, music, image, song and sound, to be experienced as writing, recordings, performance, installation, multimedia, and inside the spaces of a book. Although separate and multiple these elements are unified by a shared (under)current that transposes itself through or despite its conduits, and endeavors towards “re-membering” and attempting to synchronize the divided ‘languages’ within the self and concerning the self as placed in the world.
I was born in Vietnam in the wake of a war. My parents were writers and artists before me, in a time and setting when performing such acts of “voice” was perilous—my birth father spent ten years in the Communist "reeducation camps" after the war as persecution for his work as a writer. With my mother and brother I fled as a refugee, and grew up in a Vietnamese-Danish-American family in a small town in the hills of northern California on the same riverbanks where gold was “discovered” in 1848. I grew up communing with pine trees and ponies. I don’t speak Vietnamese but have wrestled for many years with a sense of burden, legacy, sorrow, and debt to those origins. At the same time, identity and self-definition remain fluid and elusive matters for me. Due to the roles language and memory (or lack thereof) have played in my life, I have a healthy distrust for the presumed boundaries and definitions these systems are often relied on to imbue. Conversely, I am more interested in how to read the in-between spaces, the nuanced rhythms of textures, the slow currents of absences and silence, the long echoes of trauma and memory; and in allowing vulnerability and ambiguity to undergird understanding. I use hybrid poetic experimentation, fragmentation of both text and images, and multimodal forms of voicing, to subvert and question assumed paradigms, and re-form my own means of articulation and perception. I use music and sound as an oral/aural, embodied, non-intellectual path by which to evoke and (re)inhabit ethos, and nurture my own faculties of reception and listening. Through an art that requires the awakening and engaging of multiple sense perceptions, I believe there also lies potential to deepen our own sensitivities and empathies towards one another.
OPB Art Beat Profile (Nov, 2017): “Portland artist Dao Strom uses image, music, writing and spoken word to explore the intersection of her Vietnamese birth and American life.”
SELECTED PRESS
Podcast Interviews
OPB The Evergreen: “Music Across Boundaries, Music as Home.” Dao Strom, Alicia Jo Rabins, and Julian Saporiti (No-No Boy) talk about and perform songs from their “Diaspora Songs” collaborative project at Pickathon 2024.
The Archive Project @ Pickathon 2022: Dao Strom & Jon Raymond, with Anis Mogjani. Jon Raymond and Dao Strom discuss multidisciplinary writing and artistry with Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani at Pickathon music festival.
Between the Covers (Tin House Podcast): Dao Strom interviewed by David Naimon. 22 Aug 2018.
Reviews & Interviews
Poet Q&A: Dao Strom, winner of the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Oregon ArtsWatch. May 2022.
Review for Redux album: “The Portland-based artist releases her wonderful second LP.” Sun 13. Apr 2022.
Interview: Dao Strom interviewed by Woogee Bae. Full Stop Magazine. Feb 2022.
Review: “Poetry, photography, sound and music fuse together in ‘Instrument’ by artist Dao Strom.” International Examiner. Jul 2021.
Interview: “On Excavation and Activating Ghosts In the Field: A Conversation Between Julian Saporiti and Dao Strom.” diaCRITICS. Jul 2021.
Interview: “Dao Strom and Brian Harnetty :: In Conversation.” Music Conversation. Aquarium Drunkard. Jun 2021.
Interview: “My Own Path of Hybridity.” Lamb, Meghan. Nat. Brut Magazine. Fall 2020.
Profile: “Meet Dao Strom, 2020 Oregon Literary Fellow.” Literary Arts Blog. Oct 2020.
Interview: “More Than Survival—A Conversation With Dao Strom.” Savage, Claudia S. About Place Journal. May 2020.
Review: You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else. Alessandrelli, Jeff. Hong Kong Review of Books. 19 Jan 2019.
Review: You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else. Lewis, Brigitte. Medium.com. 13 Nov 2018.
Interview: “Hybrid Inheritances: A Conversation with Dao Strom.” Palumbo-Liu, David. The Margins. 8 Nov 2018.
Interview: “Dao Strom In Conversation with Vi Khi Nao.” Aster(ix) Journal. 18 Feb 2018.
OPB Art Beat Profile: “Dao Strom’s Work Aims To Destabilize the American Vietnam Narrative.” Gilfillan, Jule. Oregon Public Broadcasting, Art Beat. 9 Nov 2017.
Interview: “Portland Writer Dao Strom Gives the Past a Soundtrack: We Were Meant to Be Gentle People Goes Above and Beyond Traditional Memoir.” Amberson, Joshua James. Portland Mercury. 3 Feb 2016.
Review: “Eric Nguyen Reviews Dao Strom’s We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People.” diaCRITICS. 14 Dec 2015.
Review: “Memory Problems: We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People.” Paige, Abby. LA Review of Books. 1 Dec 2015.
EVENT HIGHLIGHTS / PUBLICATIONS / EXHIBITIONS
2024
Poetry/Music Performances, POG Arts + Golden Saguaro, Tucson, AZ
Poetry Performance, She Who Has No Master(s), Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
She Who Has No Master(s) Collective Residency, The Studios at Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA
(Re)Configurations, poetry-art collaboration with Adam Kuby + De-Canon (poets: Anis Mojgani, Dao Strom, Sam Roxas-Chua, Samiya Bashir, Stephanie Adams-Santos, Trevino Brings Plenty), for public artwork, Mount Tabor Park, Portland, OR
Publication: A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection, De-Canon x Fonograf Editions, co-editors: Dao Strom & Jyothi Natarajan; pub date: 6/25/24
A Mouth Holds Many Things, group art exhibition (Jun 6-Sept 7), co-curator (with Jyothi Natarajan), Stelo Arts, Portland, OR (artists: Stephanie Adams-Santos, Samiya Bashir, Jennifer S. Cheng, Carolina Ebeid, Nadia Haji Omar & Christine Shan Shan Hou, Vi Khi Nao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Monica Ong, Paisley Rekdal, Sasha Stiles, Anna Martine Whitehead)
A Mouth Holds Many Things Book Launch Event, Readings and Panel Discussion, co-presented by PNCA (Pacific Northwest College of Art), Stelo Arts, Portland, OR
Music + poetry performance, Megalith Collective, Portland, OR, with Dao Strom, Lindsay Clark, Alicia Jo Rabins
Diaspora Songs (Dao Strom, Alicia Jo Rabins, Julian Saporiti), Pickathon Music Festival, Conversation + Performance, aired on OPB The Evergreen & Think Out Loud: “Music Across Boundaries, Music as Home”
Music Performance: Dao Strom & Alicia Jo Rabins, Sound Galleries at Hoyt Arboretum, Portland, OR
2023
Music Performance, Show Bar, Portland, OR (opening for Maria BC)
Diaspora Songs Performance (with Julian Saporiti/No-No Boy), Sound Hall + Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
Hyphens Lecture/Performance, Poetry/Music/Hybrid, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
2022
Winner of 2022 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry, for Instrument
Redux, 10-song album, Antiquated Future Records (cassette, digital)
Pickathon Festival, Poetry/Sung-Poetry Performance, Literary Lineup, Pendarvis Farm, Happy Valley, OR
Orcas Island Literary Festival, music performance + panels, Orcas Island, WA
Artist-In-Residence: Amy Marie Sears Memorial Visiting Artists Series, St. Catherine University. Teaching Residency + Music/Poetry Performance Event, Catherine G. Murphy Gallery, St. Paul, MN
Reverberating Bodies, solo art exhibit, Catherine G. Murphy Gallery, St. Paul, MN
2021
Instrument, Portland Book Festival, conversation event (with Alicia Jo Rabins), presented by Literary Arts, Portland’5 Brunish Theatre
A Quiet Transition: Lulling Voices, livestream concert via Experimental Sound Studio, curated by Bao Nguyen
Siren Nation Speaks Poetry Reading & Process Talk, with Endi Bogue-Hartigan, Michele Glazer, Dao Strom
2020
we breathe & breathing is (an) a|synchronous music, every body needs the air, poetry text-art installation, public artwork, Vanport Building, commissioned by Portland State University. (Vietnamese translation by Vi Khi Nao.)
Instrument/Traveler’s Ode, poetry collection + music album; publication and release by Fonograf Editions + Antiquated Future Records.
Instrument/Traveler’s Ode, poetry/music performance, visual poetry installation, Time-Based Art Festival (TBA:20), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR.
She Who Has No Master(s): Would That, Poetry/Art Solo Exhibit, George S. & Dolores Doré Eccles Art Gallery, Salt Lake Community College, Salt Lake City, UT.
2019
The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, four novellas collection, paperback reissue (with new preface and introduction), Counterpoint Press.
She Who Has No Master(s): Food, Memory, Mythology, Collective Poetry Performance, presented by Black Mountain Institute, East Las Vegas Library, Las Vegas, NV.
FODDER LIVE, Fonograf Editions Performance Event, curated by Jeff Alessandrelli, Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland, OR.
Traveler’s Ode, screening, Cadence Video Poetry Festival, curated by Poetry Northwest, NW Film Forum, Seattle, WA.
2018
You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, poetry-art collection, bilingual; pub. AJAR Press (Hanoi, USA).
“Dead Time”, international group exhibit, The Factory, curated by Emilie Dalum, collaboration with videographer Kyle Macdonald, Hotel Djúpavík, Westfjords, Iceland.
(dis)place. Curator; artist. Group photography exhibit with Roland Dahwen, Intisar Abioto, Vincent Trinh, Dao Strom, De-Canon Library, Milepost 5, Portland, OR.
De-Canon: A Visibility Project, collective project; co-facilitator: Neil Aitken, installation/residency, sponsored by Artists Milepost and APANO, Milepost 5, Portland, OR.
She Who Has No Master(s) Collective Poetry Performance, United States of Asian America Festival, presented by Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (APICC), Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA.
2017
“Origin Tale” / “15m=?” Poetry Performance, curated by Samiya Bashir, video collaboration with Roland Dahwen, Time-Based Art Festival, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR.
De-Canon: A Visibility Project, collective project; co-facilitator: Neil Aitken, installation/residency, UNA Gallery, Portland, OR.
She Who Has No Master(s) Collective Poetry Performance, American Library in Paris, Paris, France.
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