The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora Launch Party
with Viet Thanh Nguyen, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Aimee Phan, and Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Celebrate the launch of The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora, the first and only book to gather the voices and perspectives of Vietnamese diasporic authors from across the globe, with readings by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Aimee Phan, and Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai.

The Cleaving brings together Vietnamese artists and writers from around the world in conversation about their craft and how their work has been shaped and received by mainstream culture and their own communities. This collection highlights how Vietnamese diasporic writers speak about having been cleaved—a condition in which they have been separated from, yet still hew to, the country that they have left behind.

Composed of eighteen dialogues among thirty-seven writers from France, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, Australia, Israel, and the United States, the book expands on the many lives that Vietnamese writers inhabit. The dialogues touch on family history, legacies of colonialism and militarism, and the writers' own artistic and literary achievements. Taken together, these conversations insist on a deeper reckoning with the conditions of displacement.

Co-sponsored by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN).

About the Speakers

Editors

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, The Refugees, The Committed, and Simone. He co-authored Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book, with his then six-year-old son, Ellison, and is the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston. His next book is To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2025. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. 

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). She is also a member of the organization’s Editorial Committee. Isabelle is a Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. Isabelle is the author of This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature and numerous academic essays. She co-edited Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora and The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora from UC Press. Isabelle received a BA in Cultural Anthropology and a PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.

Contributors

Aimee Phan is the author of two books, We Should Never Meet: Stories and The Reeducation of Cherry Truong. She has a young adult duology, The Lost Queen, forthcoming from Penguin/Putnam in May 2025. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Time, USA Today and CNN. She has received residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Djerassi and the Bellagio Center. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is a poet and novelist, and the author of 8 books in Vietnamese and four books in English. Her novels, The Mountains Sing and Dust Child, are international bestsellers and are being translated into more than 25 languages. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the U.K.’s Lancaster University.