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.”