An update to the series. Read Khaty Xiong’s interview, and listen to/read “In Mother’s Garden.” Buy her books, or download (for free) this mini-digital chapbook, Ode to the Far Shore. A beautiful work!
The Academy of American Poets is offering a series, curated by 2016 Walt Whitman winner Mai Der Vang, featuring poems by and discussions with Hmong American poets.
Our country is enriched by its great diversity, yet we too often passively accept only what comes to us. Read these poets. Listen to their words. This is who they are. Who we are.
O at the Edges 
Thank you for this! Growing up in Wisconsin, we had a sizable Hmong population. So wonderful to see diversity honored.
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You’re very welcome, Sarah. I really admire Khaty’s work, and was pleased to see it so prominently displayed!
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Such a good read and of course very honored that you brought this up for the Hmong Community
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Thank you. I was pleased to share this.
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Thank you
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You are very welcome, P.S.
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This is so GREAT!!
I just downloaded “Ode…” and am busily setting up an evening reading nest on the shikibuton: futon, whiskey, cat, zarusoba and “Coffee Boss” for breaks once I go to Lawson and stock up for the reading. Tonight’s fare: another read through of an unpublished, upcoming chapbook by a brilliant poet whose name rhymes with “Cobbert Obadgey”, Xiong’s book, and the second half of Paul Beatty’s latest novel “The Sellout”, which is like nothing you will have ever read. Beatty is the new Kurt Vonnegut. Honestly.
Anyone can just say that. But having read pretty much everything Vonnegut wrote, ore than once, I can safely say that The Sellout is extraordinary, the next logical step after KV’s novels Cat’s Cradle or Blue Beard. And it is hilarious. If a novel about an urban black farmer who unwittingly (against his will) ends up owning a slave who used to be a TV star, segregating a local high school, and being tried in the Supreme court peeks your interest you will LOVE The Sell Out. There is a paragraph in the book about how various things are compared to jazz that had me in tears and giggles, literally.
But I digress…thank you for championing your fellow American’s work. The world needs to know about it.
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Khaty is a powerful poet, and sharing her work, and that of others, offers both comfort and pleasure. I’ve never read Paul Beatty. Will order today.
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Oh, you will not regret it. You can get in on the ground floor of a new Vonnegut, and say that you read him in his time!
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I’ll have my copy in a few days!
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Be prepared. You will probably want to read it in one sitting. I still can’t get over how Vonnegut-y it is, how anthropological it is though fiction, like KV’s work. Paul Beatty has really knocked it out of the park with this one.
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Wow. Everything I’ve read here so far is wonderful but Soul Vang’s “Soul of the Cluster Bomblet” gave me chills. Thanks so much for these!
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Oh, yeah. It affected me the same way, too.
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