Queer Migratory Art of Dissent: Lehua Taitano and Truong Tran

Saturday, November 13, 12:30 PM
In Person at Live Oak Park

Join us for "Queer Migratory Art of Dissent," a reading and conversation between two queer interdisciplinary artists LEHUA TAITANO and TRUONG TRAN where they will discuss how their visual, performance, and literary art has guided them through the radical practice of dissent. From Taitano's exploration of displacement and belonging as a Chamoru islander to Tran's confrontations with the hierarchies of language and silence in his work as a Vietnamese refugee, these two artists are joined by the migratory impulses of their art--to move out of necessity of survival, to make, to intervene. This event will be moderated by poet and scholar KAZUMI CHIN.

TRUONG TRAN was born in Saigon, Vietnam. He is the author of six previous collections of poetry, The Book of Perceptions, Placing the Accents, Dust and Conscience, Within The Margins, Four Letter Words and 100 words ( co-authored with Damon Potter.) He also authored the children’s book, Going Home Coming Home, an artist monograph, I Meant To Say Please Past the Sugar. His poems and books have been translated into Spanish, French and Dutch. He is the recipient of The Poetry Center Prize, The Fund For Poetry Grant, The California Arts Council Grant and numerous San Francisco Arts Commission Grants. Truong is also a visual artist who believes that art, be it poetry, cooking, sculpting and even gardening, are his ways of thinking through the conscious of the times we live in. Of the endeavor that is book of the other, Truong says” This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I set out to write a book with the premise and constraint of honesty. It took a decade of struggle to write, to circle back, to say the thing that needed to be said and perhaps another lifetime to hold. This book is not the performance of anger. It is angry. This book is not performing otherness. I am the other or so I am told again and again.” Truong lives in San Francisco and currently teaches at Mills College, Oakland.

LEHUA M. TAITANO is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. She is the author of two volumes of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones. Her chapbook,  appalachiapacific, won the  Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction. She has two recent chapbooks of poetry and visual art:  Sonoma and Capacity. Her poetry, essays, and Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction have been published internationally. She is the recipient of a 2019 Eliza So Fellowship and the 2019 Summer Poet-in-Residence at The Poetry Center at The University of Arizona. She has served as an APAture Featured Literary Artist via Kearny Street Workshop, a Kuwentuhan poet via The Poetry Center at SFSU, and as a Culture Lab visual artist and curatorial advisor for the Smithsonian Institute’s Asian Pacific American Center. Taitano’s  work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.

KAZUMI O. CHIN is a non-binary, queer 5th/4th generation Chinese/Japanese American living on unceded Ohlone land. I am a student of Ethnic Studies and Cultural Studies, a poet, organizer, and, of course, a TTRPG designer. My work, overall, is in the constant healing of the wounds of capitalist and colonial violence, organizing against the prison industrial complex, and searching for art-making practices that can allow for us to better pursue our goals of abolition and environmental justice. Part of the work of art is allowing people to envision, for themselves, the better worlds in which freedom from oppressive structures is possible. My work exists in this imaginative, speculative mode. Even when writing something as simple as a game for dungeon crawling, I am always thinking about the implications of the world in which such a game exists. What can our games offer the world? What have they offered already? What stories, what feeling, what agencies become possible when we ask ourselves to imagine differently?

KAYA PRESS

Founded in 1994, Kaya Press has established itself as the premier publisher of cutting-edge Asian and Pacific Islander diasporic writers in the United States. Our diverse list of titles includes experimental poetry, noir fiction, film memoir, avant-garde art, performance pieces, “lost” novels, and everything in between. Kaya and its authors have been the recipients of numerous awards, including the Gregory Kolovakas Prize for Outstanding New Literary Press, the American Book Award, the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, the PEN Beyond Margins Open Book Prize, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Award, and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize. Our books have become cornerstone texts in American Studies and Asian American Studies curricula at major universities throughout the country.

Originally based in New York, Kaya Press is currently housed in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.