DVAN, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, in a generous partnership with the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, is proud to announce our 2019 DVAN/Djerassi Writers & Poets Residency, awarded this year to the poet, Hieu Minh Nguyen. This month-long residency will be hosted at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, where writers and artists are provided food and lodging and opportunity to work on their art in the beautiful, remote, natural surroundings of the Palo Alto Mountains.
Through this partnership with Djerassi, DVAN has had the opportunity to offer 1-2 writing residencies to writers per year: in 2018, we hosted a one-week “Dialogues Across Borders” residency (with accompanying sold-out public event at the San Jose Museum of Art), which included ten Vietnamese diasporic writers from four different countries; in January 2019, we hosted a one-week residency for 12 women writers of our She Who Has No Master(s) collective project (with an accompanying sold-out Tender Table event at SJMA), and in August for the first time we are able to invite a single writer for a more immersive month-long residency. Currently, the DVAN Writers Residencies are by invite only, although at a future date we may move to an open application process.
We are thrilled to be able to host Hieu Minh Nguyen in August 2019 as our DVAN/Djerassi Resident Artist. Below we give you a profile of Hieu, who was chosen on the merit of his exceptional poetry publications to date.