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

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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).