“Presents a new face of Vietnamese America, not only to the American audience in general but to Vietnamese Americans themselves.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer
Celebrating the 25th anniversary of its publication, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and Texas Tech University Press are proud to release a newly updated version of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, the seminal anthology of Vietnamese American literature. Contextualized by a new foreword from Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and seasoned with new voices, Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition takes its place as a generational work of eclectic and essential voices.
Edited by Barbara Tran, Monique Truong, and Khoi Luu, this updated edition of Watermark continues to center Vietnamese American literature, whose emergence it celebrated upon its initial publication in 1998. Again, some of the most innovative contemporary Vietnamese American writers, such as Truong Tran, lê thị diễm thúy, and Dao Strom, explore thematic and stylistic territory previously overlooked in other collections, which have traditionally focused on war. New voices such as Nam Le, Anvi Hoàng, and Vinh Nguyen are included in this new edition, raising the number of pieces from forty to fifty-four.
Watermark lifts all constraints, leaving the works to reset the boundaries for themselves. And they do—using poetry, fiction, and experimental forms to venture further into the intricacies of the Vietnamese American psyche. A work equal measures foundational and pathbreaking, now available again for a new generation of readers—an essential collection not to be missed.
Authors
Barbara Tran’s poems have appeared in Conjunctions, Ploughshares, and The Paris Review. Barbara is a co-writer of the short, extended-reality film Madame Pirate: Becoming a Legend, a 2022 selection of SXSW and the Cannes Film Festival’s Marché du Film. Her poetry collection is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Monique Truong is a novelist, essayist, and librettist. Her award-winning novels are The Sweetest Fruits (Viking Books, 2019), Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), and the national bestseller The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). She is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Khoi Luu is a writer, editor, test-prep tutor, and admissions consultant. His fiction has appeared in The Vietnam Forum, Van Hoc, and Best New American Voices. He’s been in residence at Yaddo and was educated at Harvard. He lives in New York City.
