Such an Honor

Thursday evening, September 15, 2022, I'll be introducing the award-winning poet, Mai Der Vang, who will read from her extraordinary new collection, Yellow Rain, published by Graywolf Press in 2021. Yellow Rain was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and has won an American Book Award.

In this book, it seems as though Mai Der Vang has created a whole new genre--the work is powerful, painful, and necessary. Her poems are set against a collage of excerpts, a mounting body of documentary evidence of deliberate crimes against humanity and their cover-up, against the Hmong people in Laos, during and after the United States' Secret War there.

The event is free. Bring your picnic supper and lawn chairs to the San Joaquin River Parkway's River Center on Old Friant Road. There is live music from 6-7 pm, and Mai Der Vang's reading begins at 7 pm. She will have books to sell and sign following the reading.