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

On Friday, August 9th at 7:30 PM at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Fonograf Editions presents a live performance and album recording of FODDER by Douglas Kearney and Val Jeanty. A recording of the evening will be released as a full-length LP by Fonograf in early 2020 and a digital EP will also be released by POETRY Magazine & The Poetry Foundation.

Come be part of a moment in history! Dao Strom and Nastashia Minto will also perform at the event. Donations welcome, or become a Fonograf member. www.fonografeditions.com

About the project:
FODDER splinters the sounds you were looking at on paper into the document you can hear through speakers. &/or vice versa. Drawing in part from the award winning poetry collection Buck Studies' "Loud-Assed Colored Silence" series, Val Jeanty and Douglas Kearney interweave new and old texts of original composition, samples, and improvisation to create live sound chemistry, raw energy, and better listening through playing. Pull Up AF.

About the artists:
Poet/Performer/Librettist Douglas Kearney has published six books, including the award-winning poetry collection Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016)). He has opened for Amiri Baraka and has shared stages with Saul Williams and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. A Whiting Writer’s and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others, Kearney teaches at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

Val Jeanty is a Haitian-born, Brooklyn-based Afro-Electronic music composer, drummer and turntablist. Her installations have been showcased at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art and The Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, as well as at international venues including Jazz a la Villette in France and The Biennale di Venezia in Italy. Other highlights include “Fascinating Her Resilience,” a Wesleyan University commissioned multimedia performance collaboration with professor Gina Ulysse and with Afro-Cuban bassist Yosvany Terry on his Grammy-nominated album “New Throned King”.

Dao Strom is an artist whose work explores hybridity through melding disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. Her primary material is language—which may articulate as text, music, image, sound, space, silence, and the intersections and juxtapositions of these elements in relation to one another. She is a 2016 recipient of a Creative Capital Artist Award in Literature. Her work has also received support from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, James Michener Fellowship, and the Nelson Algren Award; with creative place-making grants from APANO (Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon) and the Precipice Fund. She has performed at the Time-Based Arts Festival and presented collaborative work at the SF Asian Art Museum and the American Library in Paris, among other venues.

Nastashia Minto is an African American woman who was born in South Georgia. Her life experiences led her to obtain an associate’s degree in occupational therapy and a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She has been writing since she was nine years old and has found that her writing offers her another way to not only help her self but others as well. Currently residing in Portland, Oregon her debut book of poetry “NAKED” was published February 28th 2019 by Eldredge Books. Nastashia has been a featured at many popular local reading series, including Unchaste Readers, Grief Rites, ROAR and Incite. Her writing has been published in SUSAN the journal, Unchaste Anthology volume III Portland Metrozine, and Nailed.

About Fonograf:
Fonograf Ed. publishes albums influenced by language and literature. Each release is available in both an analog and digital format, with a particular focus on the vinyl artifact. Through the hosting of events and performances, Fonograf additionally hopes to cultivate the performative aspect of all language, whether at a concert, poetry reading or community forum.

Fonograf Ed. albums are currently out by Eileen Myles, Rae Armantrout, Alice Notley, Harmony Holiday, and Nathaniel Mackey/Susan Howe, with forthcoming LPs by two members of the Canadian group Broken Social Scene, the musicians Annelyse Gelman and Jason Grier, the rapper milo, and an archival work by the poet John Ashbery. More information available at fonografeditions.com.

Cover art photo by Jeffery "Hitch" Hitchens
FODDER is funded in part by a grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC).

2019 MFA SPRING FESTIVAL 

Saturday, June 8, 2019
1:30-5:30 pm
North Creek Events Center
UW Bothell directions and campus map
Seattle, WA

Featuring candidates for the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics and
Guest artist, Dao Strom

Cadence: Video Poetry Festival

Verse meets visuals in motion at Northwest Film Forum (NWFF) in April 2019.

Cadence: Video Poetry Festival, presented by Northwest Film Forum, programmed in collaboration with Seattle author Chelsea Werner-Jatzke, is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry, throughout National Poetry Month. Entering its second year, Cadence is growing considerably to fill a gap in the presentation of video poetry in the Pacific Northwest. Featuring four screenings, one each Thursday of the month, the festival’s inaugural Artist-in-Residence, generative workshops for youth and adults, and a juried selection of open submissions, Cadence fosters critical and creative growth around the oft overlooked medium of video poetry.

Thu Apr 4th - 7pm :

A video poetry showcase curated by local publishers and arts organization partners Interbay Cinema Society, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Mount Analogue, Poetry Northwest, Pongo Publishing Teen Writing Project, and Seattle City of Literature.

Poetry Northwest presents: 

• Grocery Store Manager: Poetry by Keith Leonard, directed by Ian Stevens and Zachary Bivins

• Traveler’s Ode: Poetry by Dao Strom, directed by Roland Dahwen

• Song: Poetry by Elizabeth Barnett, directed by Ian Stevens and Zachary Bivins

• The Elk My Father Shot: Poetry by Keetje Kuipers, directed by Ian Stevens and Zachary Bivins