Word + Song

with Dao Strom, Lindsay Clark, Alicia Jo Rabins

IG: @megalithpdx

Show Bar Presents

Maria BC

w/ Dao Strom

Show at 9:00 PM
Doors Open: 8:00 PM

TICKETS - GENERAL ADMISSION 21+: $12.00

“Diaspora Songs” Performance + Conversation
with : Dao Strom & Julian Saporiti (No-No Boy)

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2023 | 7PM

DIASPORA SONGS
A concert and conversation with Dr. Julian Saporiti of No-No Boy (Smithsonian Folkways) and Dao Strom (Antiquated Future), hosted by Dr. Van My Truong (Ohio State University) and Sound Hall.

Urban Arts Space
50 W Town St, Suite 130
Columbus, OH 43215
Free and open to the public

Through music, art, poetry, and scholarship, Dr. Julian Saporiti and Dao Strom have meaningfully explored concepts of diaspora and the broader meanings of migrant life. Their musical interventions expand the complex meanings of what “Americana” might look and sound like beyond dominant narratives. 

NPR called No-No Boy’s music “One of the most insurgent pieces of music you’ll ever hear which re-examines americana with devastating effect…An act of revisionist subversion.” 

Wire wrote that “Dao Strom is a Vietnamese-American polymath…. The sounds are in an avant dream pop vein, with gentle vocals, acoustic guitar and electronics all burbling along like a Laurel Canyon brook filled with water of the universal subconscious.”

Saporiti and Strom will be staging a very special and rare collaboration especially for OSU/Columbus audiences, exploring where their respective ideas around music, memory, history, and diaspora overlap. This event will be free and open to the general public. 

As part of the Sound Hall series, which was launched with support from Yale’s Public Humanities Initiative, this event continues a critical commitment to connecting the arts to the humanities while exploring the larger, deeper impacts of the humanities beyond the university.

Co-sponsored by the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of Academic Affairs, the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme, the Theory and Musicology Area of the School of Music, the Center for Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, the Humanities Institute, Comparative Studies, and Professor Barry Shank.

First live music show in a while - !

Honored to be part of Pickathon 2022’s Literary Lineup!

https://pickathon.com/lineup/literary/

I’ll be reading some poems in celebration of Janice Lee’s debut poetry collection, Separation Anxiety - ! Free Event: RSVP + more info here

Orcas Island Literary Festival 2022

Panels:

What’s Love Got to Do with It: Telling Stories About Relationships

Liz Asch, Frances Badalamenti, Danielle Frandina, Emily Kendal Frey, and Dao Strom

​Our lives are occupied with relationships, from the ecstatic to the devastating. How do we express that intimacy in writing? In this panel, authors of prose and poetry come together to explore the ever-shifting nature of love in their work.

Sing in Me, Muse: How Songwriters Craft Their Stories

Olivia Awbrey, Kíque Lopez, Dao Strom, and Mandy Troxel

From the earliest ballads to Pulitzer-winning hip-hop, songwriting in America has centered on voices telling stories. These accomplished singer-songwriters will reflect on translating their personal experiences into music, and the resonant truths that a killer song can reveal.

Evening Performance Showcase: WORDS ONSTAGE | 7:30 p.m.

Main Stage Performance: Join authors Timothy Egan, Nicola Griffith, Octavio Solis, and Vauhini Vara, plus singer-songwriters Olivia Awbrey, Kíque Lopez, Dao Strom, and Mandy Troxel, for an unforgettable night of literature and music.

Online: 8 pm ET / 5 pm PT

Event Link / Register (Free):
https://www.poetryproject.org/events/raymond-antrobus-dao-strom

. . .

What are the conditions of possibility for understanding? What else must be shared for meaning to be made? How many voices are in one body? How many notes are in one voice? How many resonances are in one note? How many histories resonate out? The poetry of Raymond Antrobus and Dao Strom excavate the echo and follow the ringing memory, becoming uncontainable.

This event will take place virtually over Zoom. Registration through The Poetry Project's Eventbrite is required. Zoom links will be shared upon registration, one week before the event, and 24 hours before the event. In an effort to build and hold collective community, we ask that Zoom links not be shared. If you have any questions, have trouble accessing your Eventbrite account, or have trouble accessing Zoom after the event's listed start time, please contact Poetry Project staff directly at info@poetryproject.org

The Poetry Project is committed to making our event programming inclusive and accessible for individuals with different experiences, and are continuously working to improve and expand upon accessibility measures. Our online broadcasts feature live transcription and are presented on broadcasts compatible with most screen readers. If you have a question about either of these resources, or an accessibility measure we haven't described, please contact us at rm@poetryproject.org.

I curated the Brooklyn Rail’s 74th Radical Poetry Reading featuring poetry read by Stephanie Adams-Santos, Samiya Bashir, Shayla Lawson, Coleman Stevenson, and myself. This was a really special reading, featuring some of the poets/hybrid artists who have inspired me most, and are for me part of a formative Portland, Oregon poetry & art time/scene.

A video recording of the full reading is available at: https://brooklynrail.org/events/2022/02/23/radical-poetry-reading-with-dao-strom/

Speakers

Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. The author of five books and two song-cycles, most recently the poetry collection Instrument(Fonograf Editions) and its companion album, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records), Strom was born in Vietnam and grew up in the Sierra Nevadas of California. Her bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press), was a finalist for the 2019 Firecracker Award for Poetry. She is the co-founder and director of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s) and De-Canon. www.daostrom.com

Michele Glazer is the author of four books, most recently fretwork (Iowa 2021). She says of these poems, “I try to place myself in the presence of damage—fragmentation, disruption, gap—where language ‘fails,’ and where the natural world, if looked at closely, might offer a way to get at, get in, gather soundings. In this, my work is inspired by language, by feeling at a loss for language, and trying, in language, to give shape to a silence that gets at loss.” Her previous books are It Is Hard to Look at What We Came to Think We’d Come to See (Pittsburgh), Aggregate of Disturbances (Iowa), and On Tact, & the Made Up World (Iowa). Glazer teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at Portland State University.

Endi Bogue Hartigan’s third book of poetry, oh orchid o’clock, is forthcoming from Omnidawn Publishing in Spring, 2023. Her chapbook the seaweed sd treble clef, a sequence of poems and photographs, was published this year by Oxeye Press. Endi is author of Pool [5 choruses] (Omnidawn Publishing), which was selected for the Omnidawn Open prize; and One Sun Storm(Center for Literary Publishing), which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and both books were finalists for the Oregon Book Award. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, and she has contributed to collaborative projects with writers and artists in the Pacific Northwest. www.endiboguehartigan.com 

“A Quiet Transition” is an experimental, curatorial project that aims to adopt lullaby as a poetic, generative framework to create restful and contemplative experiences. Including a line up of a workshop, music performances, a game and a zine, “A Quiet Transition” hopes to highlight the power of lullaby as an access point to connect and reflect on personal narratives and moments of enchantment.

_
Curated by Bao Nguyen

Presented by Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network — DVAN.org

ÁCCENTED w/ She Who Has No Master(s):
“Tea & Tarot” Conversation Event w/ Hoa Nguyen & Dao Strom

Join us just prior to spring equinox for a special ÁCCENTED episode featuring She Who Has No Master(s) poets, Hoa Nguyen & Dao Strom, as they engage in conversation over “tea and tarot” about their recent and forthcoming works. Using Benjamin’s intuitive faculty and what Jung calls creative thinking, Hoa and Dao will draw cards into a vernal equinox spread to interrogate expectations and expose potentials regarding their creative practice and share creative work. After a short interlude, they will be joined by artist Thi Bui who will receive a tarot reading on her creative direction. The magical evening will conclude with a tarot reading based on a question drawn from the audience. 

Hoa Nguyen’s latest poetry collection, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, is forthcoming in April from Wave Books. Dao Strom’s poetry/art book & music album project, Instrument/Traveler’s Ode, was released in fall 2020 by Fonograf Editions and Antiquated Future Records.

Event registration TBD

~

She Who Has No Master(s) is a collective project of womxn writers of the Vietnamese diaspora who engage in collaborative, polyvocal, and hybrid-poetic works. Through a collaborative writing process and art engagement activities that reach across borders, this project endeavors to bring into concert the voices and experiences of women/womxn writers of the Vietnamese diaspora.  

SWHNMs has published collaborative poetry and hybrid art short works in BOMB Magazine and AJAR Journal, and presented readings and poetry performance at Black Mountain Institute, SF Asian Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Reed College, American Library in Paris, and at the 2018 United States of Asian America Festival. In 2020, they held their first exhibition of poetry-artwork at the George S. & Dolores Doré Eccles Art Gallery in Salt Lake City. The collective is currently at work on an anthology of genre-defying works by contemporary Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic women writers.

Founded in 2015, She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of DVAN (Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network). 

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ARTIST BIOS

Born in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated in the United States, Hoa Nguyen has lived in Canada since 2011. She is author of several books including Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and Violet Energy Ingots which was nominated for a Griffin poetry prize. Her forthcoming book, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure is a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon” with verse biography on the poet’s mother, Diệp Anh Nguyễn, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-women Vietnamese circus troupe. A popular teacher of poetics, Hoa teaches for Miami University’s low residency MFA program; as Co-chair of Writing in the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts at Bard College, and as associated faculty for University of Guelph as well as occasional reading-focused writing workshops that take place in cyberspace.

Dao Strom is the author of the poetry collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020), and its musical companion piece, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2019 Firecracker Award in Poetry; a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West (2015); and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2019, 2006) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books, 2003). She is co-founder of She Who Has No Master(s).

Presented by The Poetry Center at SFSU & DVAN@SFSU:

https://poetry.sfsu.edu/events/29185-vi-khi-nao-and-dao-strom-reading-and-conversation

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The Poetry Center Digital Archive - Event Video

Join us on Zoom for a poetry reading event

to celebrate the official release of INSTRUMENT

a poetry-art book by Dao Strom

published by Fonograf Editions.

Free, open to all, tune in from anywhere:
Nov 1st, 5-6pm Pacific Time

RSVP here

Reading with:

+Dao Strom

+Coleman Stevenson

+Emily Kendal Frey

more about INSTRUMENT (book) + TRAVELER’S ODE (music album) here



Celebrate Counterpoint Press’s reissue of Dao Strom’s 2006 book “The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys” with collaborative and individual readings by founding members of the collective She Who Has No Master(s): Angie Chau, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Aimee Phan and Dao Strom. Readings focus on the lives and voices of contemporary Vietnamese American women, talking about love, work, motherhood, writing and more. Readings will be followed by conversation and Q&A. 

She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of multivoiced collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through a collaborative art process and social interactions, the project endeavors to bring into concert the voices of women writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN.org).

About the Participants:

Dao Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry-art book, “You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else”; an experimental memoir, “We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People”; a song-cycle, “East/West”; and two books of fiction, “The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys” and “Grass Roof, Tin Roof.” 

Aimee Phan teaches at California College of the Arts and is the author of “The Reeducation of Cherry Truong” and “We Should Never Meet,” which was named a Notable Book by the Kiryama Prize in fiction and a finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Awards. 

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is a professor in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and the author of “This is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature” and co-editor of “Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora.”  

Angie Chau is the author of “Quiet As They Come.” Her work has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Ajar Journal, Indiana Review, Santa Clara Review, Night Train Magazineand the Heyday Books anthology “New California Writing.” 

The poet and artist Dao Strom will perform on Wednesday, February 19th, at 8 p.m. at The Powerhouse at Amherst College. The event, sponsored by the Amherst College Creative Writing Center, is free and open to the public and will be followed by refreshments.

Dao Strom’s work explores hybridity through melding disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. The New Yorker has called her work “Quietly beautiful… hip without being ironic.” She makes music as The Sea & The Mother, and is the author of five books, including a bilingual poetry/art book, a hybrid-form memoir with a song-cycle, a collection of novellas, and a novel. She is a founding member of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective project of women artists of the Vietnamese diaspora, as well as the editor of diaCRITICS.

FB EVENT LINK

Three members of She Who Has No Master(s) + DVAN presented poetry works at The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, Viet Nam, sponsored by AJAR Press, on 1/17/2020, our first-ever time presenting work in Vietnam.

Reading & Conversation Event

(moderated by Danielle Frandina)

to celebrate

Fur Not Light
(poetry)

by
Jeff Alessandrelli

&

The Gentle Order of Girls & Boys
(stories)

by
Dao Strom

……………………………………………………….

Jeff Alessandrelli & Dao Strom in Conversation With Danielle Frandina

Taking its inspiration from the work of Russian absurdist authors such as Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms, Jeff Alessandrelli’s Fur Not Light (Burnside Review) interrogates how deep senselessness runs in a post-truth and truthiness world. When Dao Strom’s The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint) was first published in 2006, it was groundbreaking in its depiction of contemporary young Vietnamese women living in the United States, centering their ordinary lives as mothers, lovers, friends, and daughters against the backdrop of immigration and assimilation. Available now for the first time in paperback, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys is a beautifully written, psychologically astute foray into the rite of female passage. Alessandrelli and Strom will be joined in conversation by Danielle Frandina, Literary Arts Delve Program Guide.

Preorder a signed edition of Fur Not Light

Sunday, December 1 @ 7:30 PM

Powell's City of Books

Details TBD

Visiting Writers Series: She Who Has No Master(s)

She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of multi-voiced collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through a collaborative art process and social engagement interaction(s), they endeavor to bring into concert the voices of women writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. They define writing as art that has storytelling at its core, but may express itself in hybrid, performance, visual, musical/aural, and interdisciplinary forms. This event includes: Vi Khi Nao, Stacey Tran, and Dao Strom. 

Vi Khi Nao is the author of the short stories collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture (which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016), and a novel, Fish in Exile. Vi holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University. This Fall 2019, she is BMI Shearing Fellow. Stacey Tran is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018; Black Ocean, 2019). She is the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, community, identity. Dao Strom is the author of the bilingual poetry-art book You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else; a hybrid form memoir We Were Meant To Be a Gentle Peoplewith song-cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, Grass Roof, Tin Roof and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys.

Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 6:30pm @ Eliot chapel

LitCrawl PDX: Collaborative Reading with Dao Strom/Jenny Chu/Amy Lam

Friday November 8, 2019 7:00pm - 7:45pm
The Cleaners at Ace Hotel 403 SW 10th Ave, Portland, OR 97205, USA

Counterpoint Press celebrates the reissue of multidisciplinary writer Dao Strom’s The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, a collection of novellas centering the experiences of Vietnamese women in the contemporary landscape, with a lineup of three women writers of the Vietnamese diaspora—Strom, Amy Lam, and Jenny Chu—performing readings accompanied by visuals and multimedia.

Bios:

Dao Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, an experimental memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, a song cycle, East/West, and two books of fiction, Grass Roof, Tin Roof and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys. She has received awards from the Creative Capital Foundation, RACC, the NEA, and others. She was born in Vietnam, grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, and is now based in Portland.

Jenny M. Chu was born and raised in Portland, Oregon by way of immigrant parents from Saigon and Hong Kong. She's an older sister to a little brother. In life, she is the Community Engagement Manager at Write Around Portland. In life, she thinks and writes. In life, her creative work is intermittently public. In life, her creativity is omnipresent. She often seeks the horizon on a clockless day.

Amy Lam is a writer and editor based in Portland, Oregon. She is a contributing editor and cohost of Backtalk podcast at Bitch Media, the editorial assistant at diaCRITICS, and the former editorial lead at On She Goes exploring the world of women of color and travel. She is a Kundiman fellow and received an MFA from the University of Mississippi where she was the John & Renee Grisham fellow. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Tin House, Gay Mag, Pacifica Literary Review, Utne Reader, and Papercutter.

THE GENTLE ORDER OF GIRLS AND BOYS
book release event

@ The Elliott Bay Book Company
1521 Tenth Avenue
Seattle, WA 98122

On the one hand, this is an evening that should have happened a decade ago, when Vietnam-born Portland writer Dao Strom’s marvelous book of novella-length stories, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint), should have come out in paperback, in the way such things are ‘supposed’ to happen. For reasons having nothing to do with this book’s many merits, the paperback didn’t happen - until now. Any time is a good time for a good book. And, in happening now, this evening can include two other books Dao Strom has written in the ensuing decade, each different from the other, and anything she has written before.

We Were Meant to Be a Gentle People is a hybrid-form memoir, various texts and images. More recently, there has been You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, published out of Hanoi by AJAR. Dao Strom is a founding member of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective project of women artists and writers of the Vietnamese diaspora, co-facilitator of a PoC library collective/social engagement project, De-Canon, and the editor of diaCRITICS. She also makes music as The Sea & The Mother.

Of The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys: “Small moments carry enormous weight in these four loosely linked novellas about young Vietnamese women living in present-day California and Texas . . . For Strom, the most ordinary events—eating ice cream, swatting a fly—contain minor epiphanies that can delicately convey her characters’ sense of disconnection and longing.”—Publishers Weekly.

“The book is informed by the Vietnamese immigrations of the nineteen-seventies but is filled with social observation of contemporary middle-class culture and indie sensibility . . . Quietly beautiful, Strom’s stories are hip without being ironic.” —The New Yorker. This is one not to be missed.

She Who Has No Master(s): Food, Memory, Mythology

presented by: Black Mountain Institute

Spend a decadent evening with Vietnamese poets, writers, performance artists Dao Strom, Stacey Tran, and Vi Khi Nao. With Vietnamese cuisine like bánh cuốn or cuộn giấy or bánh xèo, Dao, Tran, and Nao explore the imagined future of language and food through matriarchal mythologies. Collaborate in a performance-based, sculptural Vietnamese feast made of words, food, and diaspora.

Dao Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (2018), a hybrid memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People + music album East/West (2015), and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Precipice Fund, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, and others. She is the editor of diaCRITICS.

Stacey Tran is a writer from Portland, OR. Her writing can be found in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, diaCRITICS, and others. She is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018; Black Ocean, 2019). She is the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, community, identity. The series was founded in 2017 and has featured over 100 storytellers across 8 US cities. Stacey is a member of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of writers and artists of the Vietnamese diaspora. She currently lives in Providence, RI where she is an MFA candidate in the Literary Arts program at Brown University.

Vi Khi Nao is the author of three poetry collections, Sheep Machine (2018) and Umbilical Hospital (2017), and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (2016), and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.

While this event is free and open to the public, a reservation is required.

Eventbrite Link