![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dvan.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/SJMA_CreativeMinds_6.9.18_room.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
On June 9, 2018, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network<\/a> (DVAN), in partnership with the Djerassi Resident Artists Program<\/a> and the San Jose Museum of Art<\/a>, hosted a ten-writer, three-panel discussions event, Creative Minds: Vietnamese Writers of the Diaspora.<\/strong>\u00a0The event took place at the San Jose Museum of Art, to a sold-out audience.<\/p>\n Curated by Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his novel\u00a0The Sympathizer<\/em>, and DVAN moderators Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, and Anh Thang Dao, the event was a public dissemination for their “diasporic dialogues” project, which is compiling conversations between Vietnamese writers\u2014this group hailing from four different continents\u2014to be published as an anthology,\u00a0Dialogues\u00a0Across Borders: War and Race for Vietnamese Writers of the Diaspora<\/em>.<\/p>\n Representing a variety\u00a0of genres\u2014fiction, poetry, comics, memoir, children\u2019s literature\u2014these writers spent a week together as fellows at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, where they engaged in dialogues about writing, race, war, trauma, inheritance, and publishing experiences in their various countries, comparing perspectives as Vietnamese writers whose paths have unfolded in both different and similar ways, in different geographies, across the diaspora.<\/p>\n At the Creative Minds event, the writers were presented in three panels, each moderated by one moderator, which fostered a discussion atmosphere that was both intimate and charged, as conversations ranged from sharing experiences of the writing life, to the political, to the philosophical, to the personal and present. The three panels, comprised of ten total writers and three academic\/writer moderators, conveyed a sense of the diverse range of voices and perspectives existent in contemporary Vietnamese diasporic literature today, forty-plus years after the 1975 Fall of Saigon.<\/p>\n The three panels were arranged as follows, and video of each can be viewed via the SJMA Facebook Livestream links noted below:<\/p>\n Panel 1:\u00a0<\/strong>Thi Bui<\/a>\u00a0(Berkeley, California),\u00a0Nam Le<\/a>\u00a0(Sydney), Anna Moi (Paris), and\u00a0Monique Truong<\/a>\u00a0(New York); moderated by Lan Duong<\/a>\u00a0(Los Angeles, California).<\/p>\n View the Video<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Panel 2:\u00a0<\/strong>Hoa Nguyen<\/a>\u00a0(Toronto),\u00a0Nguyen Phan Que Mai<\/a>\u00a0(Jakarta), and\u00a0Dao Strom<\/a>\u00a0(Portland, Oregon); moderated byAnh Thang Dao<\/a>\u00a0(San Francisco, California).<\/p>\n View the Video<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Panel 3:\u00a0<\/strong>Aimee Phan<\/a>\u00a0(Berkeley, California),\u00a0Bao Phi<\/a>\u00a0(Minneapolis, Minnesota), and Viet Thanh Nguyen (Los Angeles, California); moderated by\u00a0Isabelle Thuy Pelaud<\/a>\u00a0(San Francisco, California).<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dvan.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/SJMA-CreativeMinds-6-9-18-Panel1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"SJMA](\"https:\/\/dvan.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/SJMA-CreativeMinds-6-9-18-Panel2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"SJMA](\"https:\/\/dvan.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/SJMA-CreativeMinds-6-9-18-Panel3.jpg\")
<\/p>\n