She Who Has No Master(s): Food, Memory, Mythology
Presented by Black Mountain Institute: Spend a decadent evening with Vietnamese poets, writers, performance artists Dao Strom, Stacey Tran, and Vi Khi Nao. With Vietnamese cuisine like bánh cuốn or cuộn giấy or bánh xèo, Dao, Tran, and Nao explore the imagined future of language and food through matriarchal mythologies. Collaborate in a performance-based, sculptural Vietnamese feast made of words, food, and diaspora.
Dao Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (2018), a hybrid memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People + music album East/West (2015), and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Precipice Fund, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, and others. She is the editor of diaCRITICS.
Stacey Tran is a writer from Portland, OR living in Providence, RI. She is the author of Soap for the Dogs (2018) and her poems can be found in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, diaCRITICS, and others. She is the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, community, identity.
Vi Khi Nao is the author of three poetry collections, Sheep Machine (2018) and Umbilical Hospital (2017), and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (2016), and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.