A poetry reading and book signing with Mai Der Vang

Department: Comparative Literature

Date and Time: May 24, 2017 | 5:30 PM-7:00 PM

Event Location: Humanities Gateway (HG) 1341

Event Details


The Department of Asian American Studies at UC Irvine proudly presents

AFTERLAND: a poetry reading & book signing with Mai Der Vang

​This event is FREE & open to the public. Books will be on-hand for sale (cash only) & signing. ​ ​
Due to limited seating ​ & a light reception​ , RSVPs are highly encouraged. Please RSVP to Prof. Christine Balance (cbalance@uci.edu) by Tuesday, May 23rd.

Please join us in celebrating the publication of Mai Der Vang’s critically-acclaimed ​AFTERLAND​ , ​ ​ a powerful collection of poetry that recounts with devastating detail the Hmong exodus from Laos and the fate of thousands of refugees seeking asylum. By telling the story of her own family, ​ ​ Vang also provides an essential history of the Hmong culture’s ongoing resilience in exile. ​  With poems of extraordinary force and grace, ​AFTERLAND​  holds an original place in American poetry and lands with a sense of humanity saved, of outrage, of a deep tradition broken by war and ocean but still intact, remembered, and lived.

“Line after line flow[s] like a satin ribbon burning at each end with terrible truths. . . . Unrelentingly stunning language. . . . After reading, nothing will ever be the same. This is a blazing book.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books

BIO: ​Mai Der  Vang is the author of Afterland (Graywolf, 2017) which received the 2016 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, New Republic, and elsewhere. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. Mai Der’s work has also been anthologized in Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora. As an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle, she is co-editor of How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology. Mai Der has received residencies from Hedgebrook and is a Kundiman fellow. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of California, Berkeley, along with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing/Poetry from Columbia University.
With co-sponsorship & generous support from: UCI Department of Comparative Literature, MFA Program in Poetry, Sawyer Seminar on “Documenting War,” UCI Humanities Commons, and ​the ​ Orange County & Southeast Asian Archive (OCSEAA) Center.