Oct
26
7:00 PM19:00

"Diaspora Songs" - Ohio State University (Dao Strom + No-No Boy)

“Diaspora Songs” Performance + Conversation
with : Dao Strom & Julian Saporiti (No-No Boy)

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2023 | 7PM

DIASPORA SONGS
A concert and conversation with Dr. Julian Saporiti of
No-No Boy (Smithsonian Folkways) and Dao Strom (Antiquated Future), hosted by Dr. Van My Truong (Ohio State University) and Sound Hall.

Urban Arts Space
50 W Town St, Suite 130
Columbus, OH 43215
Free and open to the public

Through music, art, poetry, and scholarship, Dr. Julian Saporiti and Dao Strom have meaningfully explored concepts of diaspora and the broader meanings of migrant life. Their musical interventions expand the complex meanings of what “Americana” might look and sound like beyond dominant narratives. 

NPR called No-No Boy’s music “One of the most insurgent pieces of music you’ll ever hear which re-examines americana with devastating effect…An act of revisionist subversion.” 

Wire wrote that “Dao Strom is a Vietnamese-American polymath…. The sounds are in an avant dream pop vein, with gentle vocals, acoustic guitar and electronics all burbling along like a Laurel Canyon brook filled with water of the universal subconscious.”

Saporiti and Strom will be staging a very special and rare collaboration especially for OSU/Columbus audiences, exploring where their respective ideas around music, memory, history, and diaspora overlap. This event will be free and open to the general public. 

As part of the Sound Hall series, which was launched with support from Yale’s Public Humanities Initiative, this event continues a critical commitment to connecting the arts to the humanities while exploring the larger, deeper impacts of the humanities beyond the university.

Co-sponsored by the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of Academic Affairs, the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme, the Theory and Musicology Area of the School of Music, the Center for Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, the Humanities Institute, Comparative Studies, and Professor Barry Shank.




View Event →
Oct
19
to Oct 20

Hyphens Lecture / Performance - Michigan State University

Two events at Michigan State University, presented by the MSU Creative Writing Program, the College of Music, and the Asian Pacific American (APA) Studies Program:


Oct 19, 3:15-4:30 PM (Music Bldg 141)
Creating Beyond Boundaries
Process presentation and conversation. Exploring multidisciplinary/multimodal art practice: music, poetry/writing, visual medias, and multi-voice collaborations.


Oct 20, 3:00-4:30 PM (Cook Recital Hall)
Hyphens Lecture & Performance
A multimodal poetry-music-multimedia performance + creative presentation on hybrid-literary and collaborative creative practices, diaspora, post-memory, and voice.


View Event →
Aug
13
9:00 PM21:00

Music Show @ Bunk Bar // Presented by Folk Magik

First live music show in a while - !

 

:::::::::Folk Magik Presents:::::::

/// Half Shadow \\\
http://hlfshdw.bandcamp.com/
////// Canary Room [Tour Kickoff!~] \\\\\\
https://budtapes.bandcamp.com/album/christine
////////// Dao Strom \\\\\\\\\\
https://antiquatedfuture.bandcamp.com/album/redux

Come for a night of magical songs that are (really) incantations, poetry on the verge of pure art, and sounds from the heart swelling into the ether.

>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
9 pm Doors ::::: 9:30 Show
::::: $13 ADV / $15 DOS :::::
::::::::::::::::::: 21 + ::::::::::::::::
>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Bunk Bar
1028 Southeast Water Ave.
Portland, OR

GET TICKETS

View Event →
Jun
4
11:30 AM11:30

Orcas Island Literary Festival

Orcas Island Literary Festival 2022

Panels:

What’s Love Got to Do with It: Telling Stories About Relationships

Liz Asch, Frances Badalamenti, Danielle Frandina, Emily Kendal Frey, and Dao Strom

​Our lives are occupied with relationships, from the ecstatic to the devastating. How do we express that intimacy in writing? In this panel, authors of prose and poetry come together to explore the ever-shifting nature of love in their work.

 

OILF Portland writers panel (L to R): Emily Kendal Frey, Danielle Frandina, Dao Strom, Fran Badalamenti, Liz Asch

 

Sing in Me, Muse: How Songwriters Craft Their Stories

Olivia Awbrey, Kíque Lopez, Dao Strom, and Mandy Troxel

From the earliest ballads to Pulitzer-winning hip-hop, songwriting in America has centered on voices telling stories. These accomplished singer-songwriters will reflect on translating their personal experiences into music, and the resonant truths that a killer song can reveal.


Evening Performance Showcase: WORDS ONSTAGE | 7:30 p.m.

Main Stage Performance: Join authors Timothy Egan, Nicola Griffith, Octavio Solis, and Vauhini Vara, plus singer-songwriters Olivia Awbrey, Kíque Lopez, Dao Strom, and Mandy Troxel, for an unforgettable night of literature and music.

View Event →
Apr
20
8:00 PM20:00

Poetry Project Reading (Online): Raymond Antrobus & Dao Strom

Online: 8 pm ET / 5 pm PT

Event Link / Register (Free):
https://www.poetryproject.org/events/raymond-antrobus-dao-strom

. . .

What are the conditions of possibility for understanding? What else must be shared for meaning to be made? How many voices are in one body? How many notes are in one voice? How many resonances are in one note? How many histories resonate out? The poetry of Raymond Antrobus and Dao Strom excavate the echo and follow the ringing memory, becoming uncontainable.

This event will take place virtually over Zoom. Registration through The Poetry Project's Eventbrite is required. Zoom links will be shared upon registration, one week before the event, and 24 hours before the event. In an effort to build and hold collective community, we ask that Zoom links not be shared. If you have any questions, have trouble accessing your Eventbrite account, or have trouble accessing Zoom after the event's listed start time, please contact Poetry Project staff directly at info@poetryproject.org

The Poetry Project is committed to making our event programming inclusive and accessible for individuals with different experiences, and are continuously working to improve and expand upon accessibility measures. Our online broadcasts feature live transcription and are presented on broadcasts compatible with most screen readers. If you have a question about either of these resources, or an accessibility measure we haven't described, please contact us at rm@poetryproject.org.

View Event →
Mar
14
to Mar 19

Poetry + Music Event // 2021-22 Amy Marie Sears Memorial Visiting Artist-in-Residence @ St. Catherine's University


In conjunction with my solo exhibit Reverberating Bodies in the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery, I will be the Spring 2022 Artist-in-Residence for the Amy Marie Sears Memorial Visiting Artists Series, working with students at St. Catherine University.


:: PUBLIC EVENT: MUSIC + POETRY PERFORMANCE ::

Wednesday, March 16, 6:30 - 7:30 PM
Free event, open to general public.
RSVP at: gallery.stkate.edu


I’ll be presenting live music + poetry in the East Wing of the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery.

View Event →
Feb
23
1:00 PM13:00

Brooklyn Rail Radical Poetry Reading: Adams-Santos / Bashir / Lawson / Stevenson / Strom

I curated the Brooklyn Rail’s 74th Radical Poetry Reading featuring poetry read by Stephanie Adams-Santos, Samiya Bashir, Shayla Lawson, Coleman Stevenson, and myself. This was a really special reading, featuring some of the poets/hybrid artists who have inspired me most, and are for me part of a formative Portland, Oregon poetry & art time/scene.

A video recording of the full reading is available at: https://brooklynrail.org/events/2022/02/23/radical-poetry-reading-with-dao-strom/

 
 

 
 

 

:: POETS ::

Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

Stephanie Adams-Santos

Multidisciplinary writer and artist Stephanie Adams-Santos’s work is rooted in the crossroads of ritual, ancestry, and environment—with a penchant for the weird, queer, and surreal. She is the author of several collections of poetry: Dream of Xibalba (forthcoming 2021, winner of the Orison Books Poetry Prize), Swarm Queen’s Crown (finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards), and The Sundering (winner of a New York Chapbook Fellowship by Poetry Society of America). Stephanie’s poems and prose have appeared in Orion Magazine, The Boston Review, Guernica, the anthology Speculative Fiction for Dreamers, among others. She is a 2022 Ojalá Ignition Fellow and is also a professional Tarot reader and occasional instructor of poetry and divination.

Samiya Bashir

Described as a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” Samiya Bashir is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome and across the United States. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes light. In 2002 she was a co-founder of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent with whom she worked through 2015. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry.

Shayla Lawson

Poet Shayla Lawson is the author of This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, Being Dope, I Think I’m Ready To See Frank Ocean, A Speed Education in Human Being, and PANTONE. She has appeared on OPB with Tiffany Camhi, NPR’s Live Wire Radio broadcast, The Special Report with Areva Martin, Salon Talks with D. Watkins, The True Romance Podcast, at The Center for Fiction with 2 Dope Queens’ Phoebe Robinson, Storybound by LitHub, at The Strand with Ashley C. Ford, Memoir Monday, and the Tanz Im August Art Festival in Berlin. She is a columnist at Bustlemagazine and has written for ESPN, Guernica, Vulture, New York, and The Cut. Shayla is a MacDowell and Yaddo Artist Colony Fellow, and a National Book Critics Circle Finalist.

Coleman Stevenson

Poet Coleman Stevenson is the author of three collections of poems, Light Sleeper (2020), Breakfast (2015), and The Accidental Rarefication of Pattern #5609 (2012), several books about the Tarot including The Dark Exact Tarot Guide, and a book of essays on creativity accompanying the card game Metaphysik. Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications such as Seattle Review, Mid-American Review, Louisiana Literature, tarot.com, and the anthology Motionless from the Iron Bridge. In addition to her work as a designer of tarot and oracle decks through her company The Dark Exact, her fine art work, exhibited in galleries around the Pacific Northwest, focuses on the intersections between image and text.

 
View Event →
Feb
5
to Mar 20

Reverberating Bodies :: Solo Exhibit @ Catherine G. Murphy Gallery

CATHERINE G. MURPHY GALLERY
St. Catherine University
2004 Randolph Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105

Reverberating Bodies

(Two Solo Exhibits) Christine Nguyen & Dao Strom
February 5–March 20, 2022

Curated by Ánh-Hoa Thị Nguyễn

Virtual Artist Talk: Wednesday, February 16, 6:30-7:30pm. Join us for a discussion with artists Dao Strom and Christine Nguyen, moderated by curator Ánh-Hoa Thị Nguyễn. Please RSVP here by Monday, February 14. A Zoom link will be emailed to participants in advance of the event.


This exhibition brings together the work of multimedia artists Christine Nguyen and Dao Strom. Inspired by the interconnectedness of nature and the cosmos, Christine Nguyen’s lyrical, luminous and large-scale paintings are paired with a suspended mobile of hand-built ceramic forms that reference diatoms and atoms.

Strom describes herself as an artist “who works in three ‘voices’—written, sung, visual—to contemplate hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories.” She combines poetry, music, imagery and video to “explore themes of displacement, hauntings, mythos, memory, and echo.” Strom is St. Catherine University’s 2021-2022 Amy Marie Sears Memorial Visiting Artist.

With each body of work installed separately across two gallery wings, the curator envisions a rich dialogue between the work of the artists. Ánh-Hoa Thị Nguyễn explains: “both artists push the participants of their art to explore parts of their interior worlds that are intangible, ambiguous and ethereal. I am excited to see how this conversation develops and evolves.”

More about the Artists:

IG: @seamoonshe
Website: christinenguyen.art

IG: @herandthesea
Website: daostrom.com

Artwork by Christine Nguyen

Traveler’s Ode: A Triptych (by Dao Strom)

Traveler’s Ode: A Triptych (by Dao Strom)


Artist/Exhibit Statement: In this exhibit of sound and poetry, Dao Strom uses three manifestations of “voice”—poetic, sung, visual—to explore themes of displacement, hauntings, mythos, memory, and echo. These “song-poems” find their seeds in diasporic longing but are also an evocation—and invocation—of voice itself as a mythopoetic space for inhabitants of the in-between.

These songs cross countries and cultures. They began as “voicings” of sầu, which is a Vietnamese word for a particular kind of ache; a sorrow held deep and privately. They are sung from one shore to another, messages sent east to west and back west to east. The narrator of these songs is a lone woman traveler, a traveler who has been traveling a long while now. She travels through memory as well as through history. On the road behind her unwind ribbons of forgetting, tendrils of re-membering: a lost country, forgotten fathers, distant mothers, lost poetry, the long echoes of past wars now distorted yet still repeating… Sometimes the woman is a ghost wearing the mourning color of white; sometimes she is a flightless figure in black wings; a displaced daughter of the fairy bird-mother of legend. This winged daughter, though grounded, never fully lands. As an inheritor of this mythos of wings, she has been a child of circumstance, a witness, an exile, a diasporic being outcast (or freed) into hybridity; non-belonging. She sees history and she questions it, sometimes laments it, asks why we do not sing of it, asks also how do we sing beyond it. The woman-traveler sings to break the silence and in hopes the messages she has harbored out of distant places might now be heard in the new places she passes through. She sings also to vibrate new bodies of memory and feeling into the spaces she passes through. She makes poems into songs into fleeting, liminal homes.

View Event →
Dec
5
1:00 PM13:00

Siren Nation Speaks :: Poetry Reading & Process Talk

Join us for the next Siren Nation Speaks on December 5, a Poetry Reading & Process Talk with authors Dao Strom, Michele Glazer, and Endi Bogue Hartigan. They’ll read from their work, talk about their creative processes, and answer your questions. Find out how they get started on a piece, see it forward, and explore the power of language and art.

12/5/21, 1-2 pm PST - Online Only:

REGISTER FOR FREE EVENT HERE

 

Speakers

Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. The author of five books and two song-cycles, most recently the poetry collection Instrument(Fonograf Editions) and its companion album, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records), Strom was born in Vietnam and grew up in the Sierra Nevadas of California. Her bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press), was a finalist for the 2019 Firecracker Award for Poetry. She is the co-founder and director of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s) and De-Canon. www.daostrom.com

Michele Glazer is the author of four books, most recently fretwork (Iowa 2021). She says of these poems, “I try to place myself in the presence of damage—fragmentation, disruption, gap—where language ‘fails,’ and where the natural world, if looked at closely, might offer a way to get at, get in, gather soundings. In this, my work is inspired by language, by feeling at a loss for language, and trying, in language, to give shape to a silence that gets at loss.” Her previous books are It Is Hard to Look at What We Came to Think We’d Come to See (Pittsburgh), Aggregate of Disturbances (Iowa), and On Tact, & the Made Up World (Iowa). Glazer teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at Portland State University.

Endi Bogue Hartigan’s third book of poetry, oh orchid o’clock, is forthcoming from Omnidawn Publishing in Spring, 2023. Her chapbook the seaweed sd treble clef, a sequence of poems and photographs, was published this year by Oxeye Press. Endi is author of Pool [5 choruses] (Omnidawn Publishing), which was selected for the Omnidawn Open prize; and One Sun Storm(Center for Literary Publishing), which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and both books were finalists for the Oregon Book Award. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, and she has contributed to collaborative projects with writers and artists in the Pacific Northwest. www.endiboguehartigan.com 

View Event →
Nov
20
5:00 PM17:00

'A Quiet Transition' Livestream Concert :: Lulling Voices


Nov 20, 2021
*livestream concert starts at:
5PM PST / 8PM ET

via Experimental Sound Studio

For more info, follow IG:
@aquiet.transition
@esschicago

Lineup:
Megan Ihnen, Mezzo-Soprano
Fahad Siadat,
Dao Strom
Handful of Spinch

 

“A Quiet Transition” is an experimental, curatorial project that aims to adopt lullaby as a poetic, generative framework to create restful and contemplative experiences. Including a line up of a workshop, music performances, a game and a zine, “A Quiet Transition” hopes to highlight the power of lullaby as an access point to connect and reflect on personal narratives and moments of enchantment.

_
Curated by Bao Nguyen

View Event →
Mar
19
5:30 PM17:30

Accented w/ She Who Has No Master(s): "Tea & Tarot" ~ Convo Event w/ Hoa Nguyen

Presented by Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network — DVAN.org

ÁCCENTED w/ She Who Has No Master(s):
“Tea & Tarot” Conversation Event w/ Hoa Nguyen & Dao Strom

Join us just prior to spring equinox for a special ÁCCENTED episode featuring She Who Has No Master(s) poets, Hoa Nguyen & Dao Strom, as they engage in conversation over “tea and tarot” about their recent and forthcoming works. Using Benjamin’s intuitive faculty and what Jung calls creative thinking, Hoa and Dao will draw cards into a vernal equinox spread to interrogate expectations and expose potentials regarding their creative practice and share creative work. After a short interlude, they will be joined by artist Thi Bui who will receive a tarot reading on her creative direction. The magical evening will conclude with a tarot reading based on a question drawn from the audience. 

Hoa Nguyen’s latest poetry collection, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, is forthcoming in April from Wave Books. Dao Strom’s poetry/art book & music album project, Instrument/Traveler’s Ode, was released in fall 2020 by Fonograf Editions and Antiquated Future Records.

Event registration TBD

~

She Who Has No Master(s) is a collective project of womxn writers of the Vietnamese diaspora who engage in collaborative, polyvocal, and hybrid-poetic works. Through a collaborative writing process and art engagement activities that reach across borders, this project endeavors to bring into concert the voices and experiences of women/womxn writers of the Vietnamese diaspora.  

SWHNMs has published collaborative poetry and hybrid art short works in BOMB Magazine and AJAR Journal, and presented readings and poetry performance at Black Mountain Institute, SF Asian Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Reed College, American Library in Paris, and at the 2018 United States of Asian America Festival. In 2020, they held their first exhibition of poetry-artwork at the George S. & Dolores Doré Eccles Art Gallery in Salt Lake City. The collective is currently at work on an anthology of genre-defying works by contemporary Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic women writers.

Founded in 2015, She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of DVAN (Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network). 

~

ARTIST BIOS

Born in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated in the United States, Hoa Nguyen has lived in Canada since 2011. She is author of several books including Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and Violet Energy Ingots which was nominated for a Griffin poetry prize. Her forthcoming book, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure is a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon” with verse biography on the poet’s mother, Diệp Anh Nguyễn, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-women Vietnamese circus troupe. A popular teacher of poetics, Hoa teaches for Miami University’s low residency MFA program; as Co-chair of Writing in the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts at Bard College, and as associated faculty for University of Guelph as well as occasional reading-focused writing workshops that take place in cyberspace.

Dao Strom is the author of the poetry collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020), and its musical companion piece, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2019 Firecracker Award in Poetry; a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West (2015); and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2019, 2006) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books, 2003). She is co-founder of She Who Has No Master(s).

View Event →
Nov
1
5:00 PM17:00

Instrument Book Release :: A Poetry Reading w/ Dao Strom, Coleman Stevenson, Emily Kendal Frey

Join us on Zoom for a poetry reading event

to celebrate the official release of INSTRUMENT

a poetry-art book by Dao Strom

published by Fonograf Editions.


Free, open to all, tune in from anywhere:
Nov 1st, 5-6pm Pacific Time


RSVP here


Reading with:

+Dao Strom

+Coleman Stevenson

+Emily Kendal Frey

more about INSTRUMENT (book) + TRAVELER’S ODE (music album) here

Dao Strom Reading NOV 1 copy.jpg






View Event →
Sep
26
to Sep 27

Time Based Art Festival 2020 :: Instrument/Traveler's Ode Release

INSTRUMENT/TRAVELER’S ODE

Release Performance & Event

DATES

September 26 | 6:30PM PDT MUSIC PERFORMANCE View on picatv.org

September 27 | 1:00–4:00 PM Instrument/Traveler’s Ode Installation and Book/Record Release at PICA Annex 

For the safety of attendees and staff, the event will be drop-in/open house style, with staggered entrance, and limited capacity at any one time. Masks/face coverings will be required. 

Visit TBA website for more info.

Instrument is published by Fonograf Editions in collaboration with Antiquated Future Records who is releasing Traveler’s Ode. Preview/preorder here:

Fonograf Editions
Antiquated Future Records

Dao Strom_TBA20-1.jpg
Dao Strom_TBA20-2.jpg

 www.pica.org/tba

DESCRIPTION

Dao Strom’s Instrument/Traveler’s Ode is an experiment in multimodal poetics—inhabiting a synergistic blend of poetry, music, and visual art: the artist’s three forms of “voice.” Born in Vietnam and leaving the country at the age of two for Northern California, Strom’s life and work speaks to fragmentation—of/within selves, histories, cultures, groups of people, and places—yet within this configuring lies her art’s fluid mastery. Combining color photography, personal biography, and gripping, restless poetry, Instrument represents a unique melding of literature and art. The poems are augmented by an album, Traveler’s Ode, an interwoven series of textured, ethereal song-poems. Atmospheric yet weighted, minimalist yet lush, the album combines voice, electronics, piano, guitars, and field recordings from sources such as rivers, sea, jungle, and birds to create a deeply emotive song-cycle that explores themes of displacement, diaspora, and hauntings. Instrument/Traveler’s Ode is a collaborative book publication/music release from Fonograf Editions and Antiquated Future Records. 

For TBA: 20, Dao Strom will give an intimate performance of songs and visuals from Instrument/Traveler’s Ode, to be live-streamed on the 26th of September. The release will also be celebrated in the unique format of an installation of visual poetry and audio fragments (played on cassette decks) in PICA’s Annex, on the 27th of September from 1:00-4:00 PM PDT, where books and cassettes will be available for purchase to mark the project’s Portland release. 

View Event →
Feb
27
7:30 PM19:30

She Who Has No Master(s) @ SF Asian Art Museum / The Gentle Order of Girls & Boys


Gentle Order of Girls and Boys_cvr_300dpi print res copy.jpg
11.06 Dao Strom author photograph by Kyle Macdonald.jpg

Celebrate Counterpoint Press’s reissue of Dao Strom’s 2006 book “The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys” with collaborative and individual readings by founding members of the collective She Who Has No Master(s): Angie Chau, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Aimee Phan and Dao Strom. Readings focus on the lives and voices of contemporary Vietnamese American women, talking about love, work, motherhood, writing and more. Readings will be followed by conversation and Q&A. 

She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of multivoiced collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through a collaborative art process and social interactions, the project endeavors to bring into concert the voices of women writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN.org).

About the Participants:

Dao Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry-art book, “You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else”; an experimental memoir, “We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People”; a song-cycle, “East/West”; and two books of fiction, “The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys” and “Grass Roof, Tin Roof.” 

Aimee Phan teaches at California College of the Arts and is the author of “The Reeducation of Cherry Truong” and “We Should Never Meet,” which was named a Notable Book by the Kiryama Prize in fiction and a finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Awards. 

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is a professor in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and the author of “This is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature” and co-editor of “Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora.”  

Angie Chau is the author of “Quiet As They Come.” Her work has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Ajar Journal, Indiana Review, Santa Clara Review, Night Train Magazineand the Heyday Books anthology “New California Writing.” 

View Event →
Feb
19
8:00 PM20:00

Poetry + Performance @ The Powerhouse, Amherst College

The poet and artist Dao Strom will perform on Wednesday, February 19th, at 8 p.m. at The Powerhouse at Amherst College. The event, sponsored by the Amherst College Creative Writing Center, is free and open to the public and will be followed by refreshments.

Dao Strom’s work explores hybridity through melding disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. The New Yorker has called her work “Quietly beautiful… hip without being ironic.” She makes music as The Sea & The Mother, and is the author of five books, including a bilingual poetry/art book, a hybrid-form memoir with a song-cycle, a collection of novellas, and a novel. She is a founding member of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective project of women artists of the Vietnamese diaspora, as well as the editor of diaCRITICS.

FB EVENT LINK

View Event →
Dec
1
7:30 PM19:30

Powell's Bookstore Reading Event - Dao Strom, Jeff Alessandrelli

Reading & Conversation Event

(moderated by Danielle Frandina)

to celebrate

Fur Not Light
(poetry)

by
Jeff Alessandrelli

&

The Gentle Order of Girls & Boys
(stories)

by
Dao Strom

……………………………………………………….

Jeff Alessandrelli & Dao Strom in Conversation With Danielle Frandina

Taking its inspiration from the work of Russian absurdist authors such as Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms, Jeff Alessandrelli’s Fur Not Light (Burnside Review) interrogates how deep senselessness runs in a post-truth and truthiness world. When Dao Strom’s The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint) was first published in 2006, it was groundbreaking in its depiction of contemporary young Vietnamese women living in the United States, centering their ordinary lives as mothers, lovers, friends, and daughters against the backdrop of immigration and assimilation. Available now for the first time in paperback, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys is a beautifully written, psychologically astute foray into the rite of female passage. Alessandrelli and Strom will be joined in conversation by Danielle Frandina, Literary Arts Delve Program Guide.

Preorder a signed edition of Fur Not Light

Sunday, December 1 @ 7:30 PM


Powell's City of Books

View Event →
Nov
14
6:30 PM18:30

She Who Has No Master(s) - Nao/Tran/Strom @ Reed College

 
Vi_Stacey_Dao_Melissa Kagerer.jpg
 

Visiting Writers Series: She Who Has No Master(s)

She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of multi-voiced collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through a collaborative art process and social engagement interaction(s), they endeavor to bring into concert the voices of women writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. They define writing as art that has storytelling at its core, but may express itself in hybrid, performance, visual, musical/aural, and interdisciplinary forms. This event includes: Vi Khi Nao, Stacey Tran, and Dao Strom. 

Vi Khi Nao is the author of the short stories collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture (which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016), and a novel, Fish in Exile. Vi holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University. This Fall 2019, she is BMI Shearing Fellow. Stacey Tran is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018; Black Ocean, 2019). She is the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, community, identity. Dao Strom is the author of the bilingual poetry-art book You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else; a hybrid form memoir We Were Meant To Be a Gentle Peoplewith song-cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, Grass RoofTin Roof and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys.

Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 6:30pm @ Eliot chapel

View Event →
Nov
8
7:00 PM19:00

LitCrawl PDX: The Gentle Order of Girls & Boys

LitCrawl PDX: Collaborative Reading with Dao Strom/Jenny Chu/Amy Lam

Friday November 8, 2019 7:00pm - 7:45pm
The Cleaners at Ace Hotel 403 SW 10th Ave, Portland, OR 97205, USA

Counterpoint Press celebrates the reissue of multidisciplinary writer Dao Strom’s The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, a collection of novellas centering the experiences of Vietnamese women in the contemporary landscape, with a lineup of three women writers of the Vietnamese diaspora—Strom, Amy Lam, and Jenny Chu—performing readings accompanied by visuals and multimedia.

Bios:

Dao Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, an experimental memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, a song cycle, East/West, and two books of fiction, Grass Roof, Tin Roof and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys. She has received awards from the Creative Capital Foundation, RACC, the NEA, and others. She was born in Vietnam, grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, and is now based in Portland.

Jenny M. Chu was born and raised in Portland, Oregon by way of immigrant parents from Saigon and Hong Kong. She's an older sister to a little brother. In life, she is the Community Engagement Manager at Write Around Portland. In life, she thinks and writes. In life, her creative work is intermittently public. In life, her creativity is omnipresent. She often seeks the horizon on a clockless day.

Amy Lam is a writer and editor based in Portland, Oregon. She is a contributing editor and cohost of Backtalk podcast at Bitch Media, the editorial assistant at diaCRITICS, and the former editorial lead at On She Goes exploring the world of women of color and travel. She is a Kundiman fellow and received an MFA from the University of Mississippi where she was the John & Renee Grisham fellow. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Tin House, Gay Mag, Pacifica Literary Review, Utne Reader, and Papercutter.

View Event →
Nov
6
7:00 PM19:00

Elliott Bay Bookstore Book Release Event :: The Gentle Order of Girls & Boys

THE GENTLE ORDER OF GIRLS AND BOYS
book release event

@ The Elliott Bay Book Company
1521 Tenth Avenue
Seattle, WA 98122

On the one hand, this is an evening that should have happened a decade ago, when Vietnam-born Portland writer Dao Strom’s marvelous book of novella-length stories, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint), should have come out in paperback, in the way such things are ‘supposed’ to happen. For reasons having nothing to do with this book’s many merits, the paperback didn’t happen - until now. Any time is a good time for a good book. And, in happening now, this evening can include two other books Dao Strom has written in the ensuing decade, each different from the other, and anything she has written before.

We Were Meant to Be a Gentle People is a hybrid-form memoir, various texts and images. More recently, there has been You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, published out of Hanoi by AJAR. Dao Strom is a founding member of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective project of women artists and writers of the Vietnamese diaspora, co-facilitator of a PoC library collective/social engagement project, De-Canon, and the editor of diaCRITICS. She also makes music as The Sea & The Mother.

Of The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys: “Small moments carry enormous weight in these four loosely linked novellas about young Vietnamese women living in present-day California and Texas . . . For Strom, the most ordinary events—eating ice cream, swatting a fly—contain minor epiphanies that can delicately convey her characters’ sense of disconnection and longing.”—Publishers Weekly.

“The book is informed by the Vietnamese immigrations of the nineteen-seventies but is filled with social observation of contemporary middle-class culture and indie sensibility . . . Quietly beautiful, Strom’s stories are hip without being ironic.” —The New Yorker. This is one not to be missed.

Gentle Order of Girls and Boys_cvr_300dpi print res.jpg
 
11.06 Dao Strom author photograph by Kyle Macdonald.jpg
View Event →
Oct
28
7:00 PM19:00

She Who Has No Master(s) @ Black Mountain Institute (w/ Vi Khi Nao & Stacey Tran)

She Who Has No Master(s): Food, Memory, Mythology

presented by: Black Mountain Institute

 
masteers.png
 

Spend a decadent evening with Vietnamese poets, writers, performance artists Dao Strom, Stacey Tran, and Vi Khi Nao. With Vietnamese cuisine like bánh cuốn or cuộn giấy or bánh xèo, Dao, Tran, and Nao explore the imagined future of language and food through matriarchal mythologies. Collaborate in a performance-based, sculptural Vietnamese feast made of words, food, and diaspora.

Dao Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (2018), a hybrid memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People + music album East/West (2015), and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Precipice Fund, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, and others. She is the editor of diaCRITICS.

Stacey Tran is a writer from Portland, OR. Her writing can be found in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, diaCRITICS, and others. She is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018; Black Ocean, 2019). She is the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, community, identity. The series was founded in 2017 and has featured over 100 storytellers across 8 US cities. Stacey is a member of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of writers and artists of the Vietnamese diaspora. She currently lives in Providence, RI where she is an MFA candidate in the Literary Arts program at Brown University.

Vi Khi Nao is the author of three poetry collections, Sheep Machine (2018) and Umbilical Hospital (2017), and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (2016), and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.

While this event is free and open to the public, a reservation is required.


Eventbrite Link


View Event →
Sep
19
to Sep 21

&Now 2019: Points of Convergence / Innovative Writing Festival @ UW Bothell

  • University of Washington Bothell (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

PANEL:

ALL THIS & MORE: Form, Subjectivity, and Difference in Hybrid, Multidisciplinary Works

with Mary-Kim Arnold, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, lê thị diễm thúy, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Dao Strom

. . . . .

&NOW 2019 Innovative Writing Festival at University of Washington Bothell

andnowfestival.com

&NOW is a bi-annual festival of fiction, poetry, and staged play readings; literary rituals, performance pieces (digital, sound, and otherwise), electronic and multimedia projects; and inter-genre literary work of all kinds, including criti-fictional presentations and creatively critical papers. We particularly encourage pieces that promote linguistic and genre transgressions, along with literary artworks that promote interdisciplinary explorations and conversations with past, present, or future literary concerns and movements.

This year’s theme, Points of Convergence, invites speculation into the ways the arts might forge convergences at a moment of social, cultural, and political schism.

View Event →
Aug
9
7:30 PM19:30

Music Performance @ Fodder Live Album Recording at DISJECTA

 
65866054_2233265253394586_3411770257272995840_n.jpg
 

On Friday, August 9th at 7:30 PM at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Fonograf Editions presents a live performance and album recording of FODDER by Douglas Kearney and Val Jeanty. A recording of the evening will be released as a full-length LP by Fonograf in early 2020 and a digital EP will also be released by POETRY Magazine & The Poetry Foundation.

Come be part of a moment in history! Dao Strom and Nastashia Minto will also perform at the event. Donations welcome, or become a Fonograf member. www.fonografeditions.com

About the project:
FODDER splinters the sounds you were looking at on paper into the document you can hear through speakers. &/or vice versa. Drawing in part from the award winning poetry collection Buck Studies' "Loud-Assed Colored Silence" series, Val Jeanty and Douglas Kearney interweave new and old texts of original composition, samples, and improvisation to create live sound chemistry, raw energy, and better listening through playing. Pull Up AF.

About the artists:
Poet/Performer/Librettist Douglas Kearney has published six books, including the award-winning poetry collection Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016)). He has opened for Amiri Baraka and has shared stages with Saul Williams and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. A Whiting Writer’s and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others, Kearney teaches at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

Val Jeanty is a Haitian-born, Brooklyn-based Afro-Electronic music composer, drummer and turntablist. Her installations have been showcased at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art and The Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, as well as at international venues including Jazz a la Villette in France and The Biennale di Venezia in Italy. Other highlights include “Fascinating Her Resilience,” a Wesleyan University commissioned multimedia performance collaboration with professor Gina Ulysse and with Afro-Cuban bassist Yosvany Terry on his Grammy-nominated album “New Throned King”.

Dao Strom is an artist whose work explores hybridity through melding disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. Her primary material is language—which may articulate as text, music, image, sound, space, silence, and the intersections and juxtapositions of these elements in relation to one another. She is a 2016 recipient of a Creative Capital Artist Award in Literature. Her work has also received support from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, James Michener Fellowship, and the Nelson Algren Award; with creative place-making grants from APANO (Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon) and the Precipice Fund. She has performed at the Time-Based Arts Festival and presented collaborative work at the SF Asian Art Museum and the American Library in Paris, among other venues.

Nastashia Minto is an African American woman who was born in South Georgia. Her life experiences led her to obtain an associate’s degree in occupational therapy and a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She has been writing since she was nine years old and has found that her writing offers her another way to not only help her self but others as well. Currently residing in Portland, Oregon her debut book of poetry “NAKED” was published February 28th 2019 by Eldredge Books. Nastashia has been a featured at many popular local reading series, including Unchaste Readers, Grief Rites, ROAR and Incite. Her writing has been published in SUSAN the journal, Unchaste Anthology volume III Portland Metrozine, and Nailed.

About Fonograf:
Fonograf Ed. publishes albums influenced by language and literature. Each release is available in both an analog and digital format, with a particular focus on the vinyl artifact. Through the hosting of events and performances, Fonograf additionally hopes to cultivate the performative aspect of all language, whether at a concert, poetry reading or community forum.

Fonograf Ed. albums are currently out by Eileen Myles, Rae Armantrout, Alice Notley, Harmony Holiday, and Nathaniel Mackey/Susan Howe, with forthcoming LPs by two members of the Canadian group Broken Social Scene, the musicians Annelyse Gelman and Jason Grier, the rapper milo, and an archival work by the poet John Ashbery. More information available at fonografeditions.com.

Cover art photo by Jeffery "Hitch" Hitchens
FODDER is funded in part by a grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC).

View Event →
Jun
13
to Jun 15

Creative Capital Artist Retreat 2019, Artist Presentation

Presenting as a 2016 Creative Capital Artist Award recipient from June 13-15, 2019.

The 2019 Creative Capital Artist Retreat at Bard College, NY, will bring together 2019 new awardees and 2016 awardees, to present from their work.

Creative Capital helps groundbreaking artists nationwide through funding & advisory services. The Creative Capital Artist Retreat brings together invited guests of more than 300 artists, arts professionals, and supporters for the exchange of ideas and expertise.

https://creative-capital.org/award/about/

Creative Capital Artist Retreat 2016 (picture by L. Cerand)

Creative Capital Artist Retreat 2016 (picture by L. Cerand)

 
View Event →