Monique Ouk’s project for the 2025 Jack Straw Writers Program is a series of poems, essays, and fiction pieces that attempt to record her family’s history, her parents’ experience of surviving the Cambodian genocide, and their life after the genocide. In her conversation with curator Kathleen Alcalá, they discuss the purpose her fiction writing serves, the people she plans to interview for her project, and why her work is an act of defiance. “The act of learning about my family, like my mother’s biological parents for example, who they were, the lives they led, whatever I can find out, and writing that down and recording it helps me remember that they existed on this world and they still exist.”

Music by Greg Kramer, produced in part through the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.

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