Born in Saigon, Vietnam, visual artist, poet and writer Mong-Lan emigrated to America at the age of five with her family after the war. While still in high school, she received scholarships for three years to attend the Glassell School of Art in Houston. Her paintings and photographs have been exhibited in galleries in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Capitol House in Washington D.C., as well as the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. She took her master of fine arts in poetry from the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she received the graduate school fellowship and the Dean’s Master of Fine Arts Fellowship. She has taught English as a second language in San Francisco and Portland, and has taught poetry writing, English composition, and business writing at the University of Arizona. She was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University during the 2000-2002 school year. While at Stanford, she served as a teaching assistant in an undergraduate Shakespeare course.
Mong-Lan’s poems have appeared in such literary journals as The Kenyon Review, The North American Review, New American Writing, and have been anthologized in The Best American Poetry of 2002, The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXIV; Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women (Beacon Press); and Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose (Asian American Writer’s Workshop). Her first book of poems, Song of the Cicadas, won the 2000 Juniper Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2001. It also won the 2002 Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers’ Awards for Poetry and was a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.
The reading is free and open to everyone. A reception and book signing will follow in Center Hall, Room 206.
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