TADIOTO

ontinuing its 2010 Literary Series – following appearances by Pireeni Sundaralingam, Andrew Lam, Ben Tran, and poems by Miguel Hernandez, Tadioto is pleased to welcome poet, performer and novelist lê thị diễm thúy, author of The Gangster We Are All Looking For (Knopf, 2001).  (see more bel0w)

April 26th, 8pm @ Tadioto, 113 Triệu Việt  Vương, Hà Nội.

adioto hân hoan đón mừng nhàvăn, nhà thơ, nghệ sĩ trình diễn lê thị diễm thuý, tác gỉa The Gangster We Are All Looking For (Knopf, 2001).

20h, ngày 26 tháng tư, tại Tadioto, 113 Triệu ViệtVương, Hà Nội.

lê thi diem thúy is an award-winning poet, novelist, and performer.  Born in Phan Thiet, Central Viet Nam, in 1972,  lê left her homeland with her father in a fishing boat in 1978.   Picked up by a American naval ship, they were placed in a refugee camp in Singapore.  She would eventually resettle to Southern California with her father.  Lê’s mother and sister joined them two years later via a camp in Malaysia.  Two of lê’s siblings drowned during her childhood; her eldest brother in the ocean in Vietnam when he was six while a sister drowned in a Malaysian refugee camp.  Lê adopted the name of her deceased sister after her father mistakenly reported her name when they were rescued at sea.

Lê took her inspiration for writing from her love of fairy tales. I wanted to write because I loved fairy tales. Reading a book of Grimm fairy tales, she recalls, I felt transported. Things happen very suddenly in fairy tales: A man puts on a cloak and vanishes. I could relate to that.

She moved to Massachusetts in 1990 to enroll in Hampshire College where she concentrated on cultural studies and post-colonial literature. In 1993 Lê traveled to Paris to research French colonial postcards from the early 1900s—images of Vietnamese people taken by French photographers. Some of the images she collected would later appear in her performance work.

On her return to Hampshire, she wrote poems, prose and pieces of dialog that would form the foundation for her senior thesis and first solo performance work Mua He Do Lua/Red Fiery Summer.  After graduation, she traveled the country from 1995 to 1997 performing Red Fiery Summer play in community spaces and formal theaters. In 1996, she was commissioned to write her second solo performance work entitled the bodies between us, which was subsequently produced by New WORLD Theater.

In the same year, she published a prose piece entitled The Gangster We Are All Looking For in Massachusetts Review. It was rerun in Harper’s Magazine later that year, and subsequently expanded into a novel.

Lê was cited by the New York Times as one of its “Writers On The Verge,” shortly before her novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, was published by Knopf (2001) to glowing reviews. Her work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Harper’s Magazine, and The Very Inside anthology, and among her awards are Fellowships from the Radcliffe and Guggenheim foundations.