Special Re-issue: Diana Khoi Nguyen

92Y's Read By

Producer's note: We return this week to Diana Khoi Nguyen's reading of poems from Asian poets in diaspora. Please support your local Asian diaspora and anti-racist community organizing, as you can. In particular, Nguyen recommends donations to Stop AAPI Hate's fund: https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/stop-aapi-hate

Diana Khoi Nguyen on her selection:

In a time of global isolation unprecedented for multiple generations, I have retreated into the community of words of others, that is, a return to the nook of books, day in, day out, and it is very much a comfort--a return to the routine days of my sequestered childhood. Today found me missing poets, writers, and humans with whom I would have had some kind of social and physical contact in this now long-gone former world of conferences, events, and travel. In a sense, I am able to be with these writers, and now enable for them to be with you--by facilitating an encounter between them and you in this intimate aural space. For this recording, I read the follow poems from the following writers:

Jane Wong, "Everything"

Dao Strom, excerpt from "Self-Travelogue/s (Endemism)”

Mary-Kim Arnold, "American Girlhood”

Vaan Nguyen, "Mekong River"

Christine Shan Shan Hou "Amanuensis"