About the Contributors
Born in Gò Vấp and raised in Dorchester & Alief, Thanh Bùi is a writer & actor currently based out of Austin, Texas. Her written work has appeared in The Offing, Lammergeier, Taco Bell Quarterly, diaCRITICS, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and other places accessible to her mom. Her film work has appeared in SXSW, CAAMFest, and elsewhere. She loves constantly.
Si-Min Chong (Min) grew up in the industrial west of Singapore, where the air smells of cacao. She makes work about vessels: women, trees, and snakes. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, she holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University.
Lan Duong is an Associate Professor in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Southern California. The author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism, Duong’s second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory, examines Vietnamese cinema through the lens of critical refugee studies and film theory. Her debut collection of poetry Nothing Follows was published in 2023.
Carolyn Huynh loves writing about messy Asian women who never learn from their mistakes. After living up and down the west coast, she now resides in Los Angeles with her partner and her chaotic dog. When she’s not writing, Carolyn daydreams about having iced coffee on a rooftop in Sài Gòn. The Fortunes of Jaded Women is her debut novel and was a Good Morning America book club pick and selected as one of the best books of 2022 by NPR. She is at work on her next novel, The Breadwinner, out from Atria in 2024.
Susan Lieu, a Vietnamese-American author, playwright, and performer, tells stories that refuse to be forgotten. A daughter of nail salon workers, she took her autobiographical solo theatre show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother on a 10-city national tour with sold out premieres and accolades from L.A. Times, NPR, and American Theatre. Her memoir The Manicurist’s Daughter is out March 2024.
Kathy Nguyễn is a writer, editor, and COO of DVAN. She taught Asian American Studies, History, Literature & Film at San Francisco City College and Berkeley City College, and was the Editor of Nhà, an award-winning Vietnamese diasporic arts & culture magazine. Kathy co-edited Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora. Her short stories, essays, and articles appear in Fourteen Hills, Fringe, Women’s World, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the East-West Center, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
Mai Tran is a genderqueer Vietnamese American writer and communications strategist. They were a recipient of Epiphany Zine‘s 2020 Breakout 8 Writers Prize and their work has appeared in Reductress, Apogee, The Margins, Vox, The Guardian, and elsewhere. They currently work as a program coordinator for Lambda Literary’s LGBTQ Writers in Schools.
