Full program: Layli Long Soldier and Truong Tran: March 2, 2017
Highlight video clips: Layli Long Soldier | Truong Tran
Poets Layli Long Soldier and Truong Tran read from new work, then engage with one another and their audience in conversation.
Layli Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and, new this March, the book Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017), recipient of the prestigious Whiting Award for 2016. She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and is poetry editor at Kore Press. In 2012 her participatory installation, Whereas We Respond, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation ― and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.”
Truong Tran is an artist and writer living in San Francisco. His books include Placing the Accents, Dust and Conscience, The Book of Perceptions, Within The Margins, Four Letter Words, I Meant To Say Please Pass The Sugar and the children's book Going Home Coming Home. His works have been translated into Dutch, French, Spanish and Vietnamese. He has been twelve years a lecturer at SFSU and is currently The Visiting Assistant Professor at Mills College where he teaches writing workshops at the intersection of poetry and the visual arts. His latest body of exploration, entitled "The PreEmptive Works," will be forthcoming in 2018.
Because We Come from Everything: Poetry and Migration
March 2017 Poetry Center programming appears under the sign of this line by Juan Felipe Herrera, in conjunction with 20+ member organizations from across the country constituting the newly formedPoetry Coalition