Welcome to Season 6, Episode 3! Our guest today is the amazing author V.T. Bidania. She is of Hmong descent and was born in Laos and grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. A prolific author with over 20 titles published already, her latest work is the very personal fictionalized memoir A Year Without Home which details her family's escape from Laos after the end of the Secret War in Laos and the Vietnam War.

A Year Without Home was released on January 13, 2026 and published by Nancy Paulsen Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers. It's her debut middle grade novel and written in a unique style with lyrical verse. Told through the eyes of eleven-year-old Gao Sheng, Bidania does an amazing job of immersing the reader into the joys of what it was like to live in Laos as well as the challenges and horrors of fleeing as refugees.

Her previous works are the Astrid and Apollo series and the new spin-off Extraordinary Eliana series. Both uplift Hmong culture in a joyous informative way. In our conversation, V.T. shares her journey to writing, the challenges of researching for A Year Without Home, how she decided to lay things out in the book, why the book is even more important now than ever, and a lot more.

To learn more about V.T. Bidania and the Hmong culture, you can visit her website vtbidania.com, follow her on Instagram @vtbidania, and of course purchase or any book int he Astrid and Apollo or Extraordinary Eliana series.

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