[Poet Spotlight] Katie Vang

Katie Vang is a performance artist, playwright, poet and mover. She has been described as a “dynamic performer and relentless writer of truth.” She has performed for Pangea World Theater (as ensemble member), Theatre Mu, Pillsbury House Theatre, Exposed Brick Theatre, Ordway Center for Performing Arts, Center for Hmong Arts and Talent, The Walker Art Center.

She has self-released a collection of poetry and prose called Never Said. Her work has been published in Saint Paul Almanac, Bakka Mag., Asian American Press, BlueFifth Magazine and Voices from the Asian American Experience.

 Her commissioned performances and plays include wtf, Hmong Bollywood, 5:1 Meaning of Freedom; 6:2 Use of Sharpening (as a Naked Stages Fellow), Youth In Session (CHAT’s Creative Drama Youth class), and Myth of Xee (CHAT’s Creative Drama Youth class).

She’s received grants from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and was awarded a NPN Creation Fund to complete Hmong Bollywood.

 She’s worked with C.H.A.T. Center for Hmong Arts and Talent, the first known Hmong Arts organization in the world, for over a decade as a program director, teaching artist and volunteer. In 2012, she received recognition for her contributions to improving the lives of Hmong women and the community, with the Woman Of The Year award.

[Poet Spotlight] Kao Kalia Yang

Kao Kalia Yang is a teacher, public speaker, and writer. Yang is the author of the award-winning book, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (Coffee House Press, 2008) and the book, The Song Poet (Metropolitan Books, 2016).

She is a graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Kao Kalia lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her family. Kao Kalia Yang is a member of the Hmong ethnic minority. Born in Thailand’s Ban Vinai Refugee Camp, Yang is now an American citizen.

[Poem] Burning Eden One Branch At A Time

"Burning Eden One Branch At A Time" appears in my book On The Other Side Of The Eye, first released in 2007 as part of my collection of Lao American speculative poetry.

[Poet Spotlight] Mai Der Vang

Mai Der Vang was born on October 20, 1981, in California’s Central Valley. She earned her MFA in poetry from Columbia University where she was awarded the Corrente Poetry Fellowship. Vang received her BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

Her debut poetry collection, Afterland, was selected by Carolyn Forché as the winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award, given by the Academy of American Poets, and will be published by Graywolf Press in 2017.

About Afterland Forché writes:

"Afterland has haunted me. I keep returning to read these poems aloud, hearing in them a language at once atavistic, contemporary, and profoundly spiritual. Mai Der Vang confronts the Secret War in Laos, the flight of the Hmong people, and their survival as refugees. That a poet could absorb and transform these experiences in a single generation—incising the page with the personal and collective utterances of both the living and the dead, in luminous imagery and a surprising diction that turns both cathedral and widow into verbs, offering both land and body as swidden (slashed and burned)—is nothing short of astonishing. Here is deep attention, prismatic intelligence, and fearless truth."

Vang’s poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, The Journal, The Cincinnati Review, The Missouri Review Online, Radar, Asian American Literary Review, The Collagist, and elsewhere. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. As an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle, she is coeditor of How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heydey, 2011).

She has received residencies from Hedgebrook and is a Kundiman fellow. Vang lives in Fresno, California, where she teaches at Clovis Community College and works as a writing/creative consultant.