ÁCCENTED

Cathy Linh Che and Christopher Santiago converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Chris Santiago is the author of Small Wars Manual, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in April 2025, and Tula, winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. His poems have appeared in POETRY, Conduit, Copper Nickel, Poetry Northwest, Beloit Poetry Journal, American Public Media’s The Slowdown, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, the Mellon Foundation/ACLS, and Kundiman, he is a graduate of Oberlin College and received his PhD from the University of Southern California (USC)’s Literature & Creative Writing Program. He teaches creative writing, sound studies, and Asian American literature in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and has also taught at USC and at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books) and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. She teaches as Core Faculty in Poetry at the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and works as Executive Director at Kundiman. She lives in New York City.

Abbigail Rosewood, Travis Snyder, and Katherina Nguyen converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Katherina Nguyen is a creative technologist building ways to better connect with the past and future. She led high-impact design systems development for organizations like Harvard Kennedy School and Google, and currently works on AI storytelling tools at Meta. A Bay Area native and 1.5 generation Vietnamese-American via the H.O. program, she has been exploring her evolving diaspora identity through poetry and narrative essays. With DVAN, Kat leads the Texas Tech publishing series and upcoming Mapping the Diaspora project.

Abbigail N. Rosewood was born in Vietnam, where she lived until the age of twelve. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her debut novel, IF I HAD TWO LIVES, has been hailed as “a tale of staggering artistry” by the Los Angeles Review of Books and “a lyrical, exquisitely written novel” by the New York Journal of Books. The New Yorker called it “a dangerous fantasy world’ that ‘double haunts the novel.” Her short fiction and essays can be found at Electric Lit, LitHub, Catapult, The Southampton Review, The Brooklyn Review, Columbia Journal, The Adroit Journal, among others. In 2019, her hybrid writing was featured in a multimedia art and poetry exhibit at Eccles Gallery. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best American Short Story 2020. She’s the founder of Neon Door, a forthcoming immersive literary exhibit.

Travis Snyder is the acquisitions editor at Texas Tech University Press, working on scholarly and literary genres. He has a PhD in 20th century American literature and postmodern theory. He has taught at Trinity University and the University of Texas - San Antonio.

This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Francois Chan, Kim Ly, and Nguyen Phan Que Mai converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of The Sympathizer, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, The Refugees, and Race and Resistance: Literature, Politics and Asian America. His most recent book was Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his son Ellison. His most recent book is The Committed. 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. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), for The Sympathizer.

François Chau is an Asian-American actor. Born in Phnom, Penh, he is half Cambodian and half Vietnamese. He has been a professional actor for over 35 years with over 150 credits in film, television, and stage. He is best known for his roles in Lost, The Expanse, and  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2. He is very pleased to have been the narrator for both of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s books, The Sympathizer and The Committed.

Kim Ly was born 1983 in Stockholm, Sweden to a Vietnamese father and a Swedish mother. After graduating from the university of Stockholm with a masters degree in marketing, he decided to pursue a career in modeling and film. In 2014 he got an opportunity to star in the Vietnamese action film Hương Ga. The film was well received and Kim has since then resided in Saigon. In 2017, he produced and starred in the Action/Comedy Saigon Bodyguards. The film became a big hit and The Russo Brothers (Marvel films) acquired the rights for the remake in 2020. Kim Ly has continued working as a brand ambassador for numerous high end brands as well as humanitarian work with Newborns Vietnam, Heartbeat Vietnam and UN Women. He is currently working on the film/tv adaptation of The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Dr. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is an award-winning writer in both Vietnamese and English. Her eight books of poetry, short fiction and non-fiction in Vietnamese have received the Poetry of the Year 2010 Award from the Hanoi Writers Association, the Capital’s Literature & Arts Award, and First Prize in the Poetry Competition celebrating 1,000 Years of Hanoi. Her debut novel and first book in English, The Mountains Sing, is an International Bestseller, a New York Times Editors’ Choice Selection, Winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Best Debut Award, Winner of the Blogger’s Book Prize 2021, and Winner of the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for “a work of exceptional quality” and for “contribution to peace and reconciliation”. Quế Mai is an editor of DVAN’s publishing series with Kaya Press and Texas Tech University Press. She has a PhD in Creative Writing with Lancaster University. Her writing has been translated and published in more than fifteen countries. She has just been named by Forbes Vietnam as one of 20 inspiring Vietnamese women of 2021.

This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Bao Phi, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Cathy Linh Che, and Paul Tran converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

A two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, Bao Phi has appeared on HBO Presents Russell Simmons Def Poetry, featured in the live performances and taping of the blockbuster diasporic Vietnamese variety show Paris By Night 114: Tôi Là Người Việt Nam, and a poem of his appeared in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology. His poems and essays are widely published in numerous publications including Screaming Monkeys and Spoken Word Revolution Redux. He has two collections of poems, both published by Coffeehouse Press, Sông I Sing and Thousand Star Hotel, the latter of which was nominated for the Minnesota Book Award and was chosen as 2017’s best poetry book of the year by San Francisco State’s Poetry Center.

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Her work has been published in The New Republic, McSweeney’s, and Poetry. She has received awards from MacDowell, Djerassi, The Anderson Center, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Poets House, Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, The Asian American Literary Review, The Center for Book Arts, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency, the Jerome Foundation. She has taught at the 92nd Street Y, New York University, Fordham University, Sierra Nevada College, and the Polytechnic University at NYU. She was Sierra Nevada College’s Distinguished Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence. She serves as Executive Director at Kundiman and lives in NYC.

Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen was born and raised in California. She earned a BA in English and Communication Studies from UCLA, an MFA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the University of Denver. She is the author of the chaplet Unless (Belladonna*, 2019) and debut poetry collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), selected for the Omnidawn Open Contest and a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. It received the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and Colorado Book Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in magazines and journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, and PEN America.

Paul Tran is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. Their work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Good Morning America, NYLON, and elsewhere, including the RZA-directed movie Love Beats Rhymes (Lionsgate) alongside Azealia Banks, Common, and Jill Scott. Since 2013, Paul has coached the poetry slam teams at Brown University, Barnard College & Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Paul was the first Asian American since 1993—and first transgender poet ever—to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam, placing top 10 at the Individual World Poetry Slam and top 2 at the National Poetry Slam.

This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Dao Strom, Hoa Nguyen, and Thi Bui converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

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).

Thi Bui‘s debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, 2017) was selected for an American Book Award, a Common Book for UCLA and other colleges and universities, an all-city read by Seattle and San Francisco public libraries, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, and an Eisner Award finalist in reality-based comics. Her short comics can be found online at The Nib, PEN America, and BOOM California.

This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Kieu Chinh, Bao Nguyen, Jenni Trang Le, and Viet Nguyen converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Bao Nguyen is an award-winning filmmaker based in Los Angeles and Saigon. His work has appeared in the New York Times, HBO, Vice, NBC, ARTE, among others. He was the producer and cinematographer of NUOC2030 a feature sci-fi that opened the Panorama section of the 2014 Berlinale and was awarded the Tribeca Sloan Filmmaker Award. In 2015, he directed the documentary feature, LIVE FROM NEW YORK! which opened the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. He produced Tran Thanh Huy’s ROM which world premiered at the Busan International Film Festival where it won the festival’s top prize, the New Currents award.

Jenni Trang Le born & raised in Houston, Texas and in 1994 moved to California where her cousins "Vietnamized" her and there was no turning back from there. She has always had a flair for the dramatics and in 1999, she joined Club O' Noodles, a Vietnamese American theatre troupe and started writing and performing spoken word. It was through Club O' Noodles that she started getting more involved in the Vietnamese arts community which would eventually lead to meeting her fellow panel members today. Jenni fell into filmmaking via helping friends with their various projects and in 2005, she was invited to Vietnam to be the 1st Assistant Director of "The Rebel", a period action film set in French-occupied Vietnam in 1922, where peasant rebellions against the French colonialists have erupted throughout the country. This film was directed by Charlie Nguyen and started off Jenni's love affair with Vietnam. In 2009 she moved to Vietnam, intending to stay for a year and check out the film scene. She blinked and now it has been 11 years. Since then she has produced mostly feature films along with short documentaries, commercials, and music videos.

Kieu Chinh is a legendary Vietnamese-American actress with nearly six decades of international contributions to the motion picture industry from: Vietnam, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, China, India, Australia, and Canada. Following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Kieu-Chinh became a refugee. She came to the U.S. under the generosity and sponsorship of actress, Tippi Hedren, whom helped Chinh get back to work in Hollywood.

Viet Nguyen has directed a bunch of tv shows including: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, The Flash, Lucifer, and iZombie. He also directed and co-wrote the award-winning, horror-comedy feature, Crush the Skull, which has been seen by at least 12 people on Amazon Prime.

Next up, Viet will be directing new shows, Panic, for Amazon, as well as, Big Shot, for Disney Plus.

Viet is an Austin native who graduated from film school at the University of Texas. He’s known for his Southern charm and firm handshake, but his real talent, according to his wife, is he’s super handsome. (Viet's wife did not approve of this bio.)

Lastly, Viet is constantly mistaken for the Pulitzer-prize winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and has autographed several books on his behalf.

Phuc Tran converses with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Phuc Tran was born in Sài Gòn Việt Nam, his family fled to America in 1975, and he grew up in Carlisle PA. Reared on a steady diet of Saturday morning cartoons, John Hughes, Star Wars, Bones Brigade videos, and bootlegged cassettes of Minor Threat and TSOL, he graduated high school in 1991. He majored in Classical Languages and Literature at Bard College—how did no one talk him out of that?—got his Master’s Degree at University of Massachusetts Amherst, and then moved to New York City in 1997. There he apprenticed to be a tattooer while teaching Latin during the day, and he's been teaching and tattooing ever since. He's never been good at staying in one lane—ask his wife about his driving. In April 2020 my memoir Sigh, Gone was published by Flatiron Books. You can read the memoir to get all the gory details of his childhood and adolescence, but spoiler alert: he does somehow survive.

This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Marc dela Cruz, Qui Nguyen, Diep Tran, and Susan Lieu converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Marc dela Cruz got his start in theater in Seattle with the Northwest Asian American Theatre, ReAct and the series Sex in Seattle, while a student at the University of Washington. After finishing his degree in International Studies with a minor in Japanese he continued training and performing around the Seattle area with Village Theatre and the 5th Avenue Theatre. In 2006, he moved to New York and began auditioning for everything he was remotely right for. Credits since then have included the national tour of Disney’s High School Musical, the world premiere of Where Elephants Weep in Cambodia, his Broadway debut in the original cast of If/Then and subsequent national tour and his current post in the Broadway cast of Hamilton where he is in the ensemble and understudies Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Laurens/Philip and King George. Off-Broadway he appeared in Keen Company’s revival of Ordinary Days and Transport Group’s Three Days to See. Regional highlights include Quang in Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone at Studio Theatre in D.C., Dan in Next to Normal with Tantrum Theatre and the world premiere of Allegiance at the Old Globe. He currently lives in Harlem with his cat, Eddie.

Qui Nguyen is a Co-Founder of the OBIE Award-winning Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company of New York City, the “pioneers of geek theatre.” His best-known plays include Vietgone, Poor Yella Rednecks, She Kills Monsters, Revenge Song, Alice in Slasherland, and Living Dead in Denmark. For TV, he most recently wrote on AMC’s Dispatches from Elsewhere and Netflix’s The Society. His upcoming film, Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon, co-written with Adele Lim, premieres this March 12, 2021. He’s also a recipient of a 2016 Daytime Emmy Award for his writing on PBS’s Peg+Cat.

Diep Tran is a journalist and editor based in NYC. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, NBC Asian America, Hello Giggles, Playbill, Time Out New York, Backstage, CNN, Salon, and other publications. Her day jobs include being features editor of Broadway.com and senior editor of American Theatre magazine. She is a judge for the 2020 Obie Awards and is a 2020 Drama Desk Award voter. During quarantine, she co-founded a media company called Token Theatre Friends (you can subscribe to their podcast) and helped launch VietFactCheck.org, where she’s the managing editor.

Susan Lieu is a Vietnamese-American activist, playwright, and performer who tells stories that refuse to be forgotten. With a vision for individual and community healing—made possible through the interplay of comedy and drama—her work delves deeply into the lived realities of body insecurity, grieving, and trauma. Her first theatrical solo show, 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, is the true story of how her mother died from plastic surgery malpractice when Lieu was 11 years old and her search to find her mother’s killer. Susan self-produced a nearly sold-out 10-city National Tour with press from L.A. Times, NPR, The Washington Post (The Lily), NBC News, American Theatre, and The Seattle Times. Lieu has performed her show and its sequel 51 times to 6000 people in the past year. Her work has been showcased with The Wing Luke Museum, The Moth at Benaroya Hall, On The Boards, and Bumbershoot.

Dao Strom, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Sophia Terazawa, and Vi Khi Nao converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Dao Strom is a poet, musician, writer, and interdisciplinary artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author/composer of several hybrid-literary works, including the poetry-art collection, INSTRUMENT, and its musical companion of song-poems, TRAVELER’S ODE, and the forthcoming TENDER REVOLUTIONS/YELLOW SONGS (2025). She co-edited/co-curated the hybrid-literary anthology + exhibit A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS (2024). Strom’s work encompasses both solo and collaborative art and writing projects, and has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, NEA, Oregon Community Foundation, and others. Born in Vietnam, Strom now lives in Portland, Oregon.

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (2018) which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Root Fractures (2024). Her video work has recently been exhibited at the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art. Nguyen is a Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, she currently teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Sophia Terazawa is a poet of Vietnamese-Japanese descent. She is the author of two chapbooks: Correspondent Medley (winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize, published with Factory Hollow Press) and I AM NOT A WAR (a winner of the 2015 Essay Press Digital Chapbook Contest). Her poems appear in The Seattle Review, Puerto del Sol, Poor Claudia, and elsewhere. She is currently working toward the MFA in Poetry at the University of Arizona. Her favorite color is purple. sophiaterazawa.com

Vi Khi Nao is the author of Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), the short story collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 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; her interviews with writers have appeared in many publications as well. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University, where she received the John Hawkes and Feldman Prizes in fiction and the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award in poetry. vikhinao.com

This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Tu David Phu, Genevieve Erin O'Brien, and Mark Padoongpatt converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Tu David Phu is a Vietnamese-American, Top Chef Alumnus, and SF Chronicle Rising Star Chef from Oakland. Chef Tu’s Vietnamese-California cuisine began garnering press and accolades, first in 2016 with his weekly pop up dinners “ĂN – a Vietnamese Dining Experience.”; then in 2017 San Francisco Chronicle named him Rising Star Chef. In 2019, he was a featured contestant on Bravo’s Top Chef Season 15 and invited to host ABC’s Taste Buds: Chefsgiving which was nominated for a James Beard Award.As a first-generation, Vietnamese-American, food justice comes naturally to Chef Tu, who finds opportunities to use the medium of food as a vessel for meaningful work from cooking with incarcerated men in San Quentin; to being a community ambassador in Oakland working with Asian Health Services and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. Chef Tu not only applies these Zero Waste principles in his own kitchen, he is a James Beard Smart Catch Leader, recognized for promoting the use of sustainable seafood options; and an avid teacher, sharing the riches and lessons of his birthright through food.

Genevieve Erin O’Brien is a Queer Vietnamese/Irish/German artist with 20+ years as a community organizer, trainer, cultural producer, and chef. O’Brien holds an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a Fulbright Fellow to Vietnam in 2009. O’Brien has been a frequent lecturer in Asian American Studies. Their short film For The Love of Unicorns has screened internationally. O’Brien received the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles’ Creative Economic Development Fund in 2015 & 2016. As a US Dept. of State/ZERO1 American Arts Incubator Artist, O’Brien traveled to Hanoi to develop a digital media project highlighting LGBTQ visibility and equality in 2016. Recent works More Than Love on the Horizon and Sugar Rebels were commissioned by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. The Critical Refugees Studies Collective of the University of California recently funded O’Brien’s current performance series “Refugee Resistance Menu.” O’Brien, once a butcher’s apprentice, is also a private chef and chef/owner of sausage enterprise Meat My Friends (www.eatmeatmyfriends.com). Visit https://www.erin-obrien.com for more information.

Mark Padoongpatt is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California in 2011. His researches and writes on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the twentieth-century United States, with a focus on empire, migration, race, and urban and suburban cultures. His book, Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America (University of California Press, 2017), explores how and why Thai food shaped the contours of Thai American community and identity since World War II. He’s currently writing a book and developing a podcast series on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Las Vegas titled “Neon Pacific,” which explores histories of race, space, and placemaking in Vegas.