Pulitzer Prize finalist Mai Der Vang with Chaun Webster

Pulitzer Prize finalist Mai Der Vang will be joined by poet and scholar Chaun Webster for a reading and  conversation of her new collection of poetry, Primordial. In this new collection, Vang addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam, as a vehicle to investigate the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities, the ongoing cultural and environmental repercussions of the war in Vietnam, the lives of refugees afterward, and the postmemory carried by their descendants.

Vang’s work is lyrically insistent and visually compelling as she examines the saola’s relationship to Hmong refugee identity and cosmology and a shared sense of exile, precarity, privacy, and survival. Can a war-torn landscape and memory provide sanctuary, and what are the consequences for our climate, our origins, our ability to belong to a homeland? Written during a difficult pregnancy and postpartum period, Vang’s poems are urgent stays against extinction.

She will be in conversation with Chaun Webster.