Asian American Literature Today: Monique Truong + Rick Barot

Join novelist Monique Truong and poet Rick Barot as they read from their new books (The Sweetest Fruits and The Galleons) and discuss their writing with moderator Jason Oliver Chang, followed by audience Q&A and book signings.

Monique Truong is a Vietnamese American novelist, essayist, librettist, former refugee, avid eater, and intellectual property attorney (more or less in this order). Her novels are The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), and The Sweetest Fruits (Viking Books, 2019), which have earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, PEN/Bingham Fellowship, Hodder Fellowship, and New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, among others. She is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University MFA Writing Program and has taught fiction workshops also at Princeton and Baruch College. She serves as vice president of the Authors Guild and is a member of Hedgebrook’s Creative Advisory Council and DVAN’s Advisory Committee.

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has published four volumes of poetry: The Darker Fall (Sarabande Books, 2002); Want (Sarabande Books, 2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; Chord (Sarabande Books, 2015), winner of the UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; and, most recently, The Galleons (Milkweed Editions, 2020). His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. He is also the poetry editor for New England Review.

Free to the public. Wheelchair accessible, amplified sound, access copies, lights dimmable upon request. Ballroom space is scent-free, but front lobby of the hotel burns sage and palo santo throughout the day. No ASL interpretation available.

The Asian American Literature Today series, launched in 2014, appears as a partnership between the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center, and Kundiman.

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