“REFRAMING LANGUAGE: EXPANDING HMONG DISCOURSE THROUGH POETIC INVESTIGATION, FROM YELLOW RAIN TO SAOLA”

Mai Der Vang
Assistant Professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing
College of Arts and Humanities
Fresno State University
Poetry is largely seen as a tool for literary and creative output, but its malleability and shape-shifting nature lends itself to other possibilities of form and engagement. Within its power to convey and reshape ideas, there is room for historical research, critical inquiry, and the act of restructuring language. Through a process of documentary poetry, past and present injustices are revisited and investigated to allow for new reckonings to emerge. Narratives are recentered to amplify what has been historically silenced, and the page becomes a space in which to rupture convention and restore one’s agency. With these ideas in mind, I’ll be discussing my practice as a poet and will also read from my work. My second book, Yellow Rain, examined the dismissing of allegations surrounding the use of a chemical biological weapon against Hmong refugees following the end to the US war in Vietnam, while my newest collection, Primordial, looks to the environment and the endangered saola as a means by which to understand Hmong survival and loss.
Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, along with Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her third collection, PRIMORDIAL, is forthcoming in 2025 from Graywolf Press. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, her poetry has appeared in Tin House, the American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.
Website: https://maidervang.com/