The East Side Freedom Library and the Ramsey County Historical Society  invite you to our monthly “History Revealed” program, featuring Kao  Kalia Yang.  

As the country’s doors were closing and nativism was on the rise, Kao  Kalia Yang—herself a refugee from Laos—set out to tell the stories of  the refugees to whom University Avenue is now home. Here are people who  have summoned the energy and determination to make a new life even as  they carry an extraordinary burden of hardship, loss, and emotional  damage. In Yang’s exquisite, poetic, and necessary telling, the voices  of refugees from all over the world restore humanity to America’s  strangers and redeem its long history of welcome.  

KAO KALIA YANG is a Hmong-American writer. She holds degrees from  Carleton College and Columbia University. Yang is the author of The  Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir winner of the 2009 Minnesota Book  Awards in Creative Nonfiction/Memoir and Readers’ Choice, a finalist for  the PEN USA Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the Asian Literary Award  in Nonfiction. Her second book, The Song Poet won the 2016 Minnesota  Book Award in Creative Nonfiction Memoir, was a finalist for the  National Book Critics Circle Award, the Chautauqua Prize, a PEN USA  Award in Nonfiction, and the Dayton’s Literary Peace Prize. The story  has been commissioned as a youth opera by the Minnesota Opera and will  premiere in the spring of 2021. She is now writing a series of  children’s books. For this event, before we open the virtual floor for  questions and comments from audience members, Yang will be joined in  conversation by four readers of her book:  

Saymoukda Duanphouxay Vongsay is an award-winning Lao American poet,  playwright, cultural producer, and social practice artist. She is the  author of the children’s book WHEN EVERYTHING WAS EVERYTHING (Full  Circle Publishing) and is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation  Playwright in Residence at Theater Mu. Visit her at  www.SaymoukdaTheRefugenius.com and follow her @refugenius.  Thet-Htar Thet (she/her/hers) is a writer, educator and activist  originally from Yangon Myanmar. Now based in her home country, Thet-Htar  is focused on education reform and identity-driven writing as a  consultant for UNESCO and a freelance creative nonfiction writer.  

Sangay Taythi is a Tibetan refugee born in India who with his family  immigrated to the United States in 1998. He has been a community and  labor organizer, including the Students for a Free Tibet chapter at the  University of Minnesota, the Regional Tibetan Youth Congress of  Minnesota, the Tibetan American Foundation of Minnesota, the Tibetan  National Congress and Tibetans for Black Lives and SEIU Healthcare  Minnesota.  Najaha Musse is a 4th year medical student pursuing a doctorate in  Osteopathic Medicine. Her family fled rural Ethiopia for a refugee camp in Nairobi Kenya, and then settled in Minnesota where she began formal education in the 3rd grade. As the oldest in a family of 8 children, she became the first in her family to graduate from high school and receive a college degree. While attending medical school, Najaha has focused on social justice issues pertaining to educational access for disadvantaged students and social medicine.