What does it mean to exist in the spaces in-between?
Join five Vietnamese-American women writers as they investigate the complexities and richness of what it means to exist in-between. Through poetry, prose, and storytelling, our readers will explore the tension between past and present, belonging, identity, and homeland. Come ready to listen and connect to stories that may resonate or challenge your own spaces of in-between, for it is in these spaces that we get to decide how our story unfolds.
The topic resonates with an important date in Vietnamese American history as 2025 marks the 50th Anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and the formation of the Vietnamese diaspora.
This will be the inaugural reading of DVAN’s CôEm Collective, a SF-Bay Area based writing collective made up of intergenerational Vietnamese-American women and non-binary writers.
This event is FREE, but space is limited. Please RSVP to ensure your seat.
If you'd like to request special accommodations, please email us at hello@dvan.org.
ABOUT THE CÔEM COLLECTIVE
CôEm is a poem to our motherland. We are a sisterhood of intergenerational diasporic Vietnamese women writers.Vietnamese women’s voices are often silenced, overlooked, erased or appropriated. We create space where we can hear one another, forge community through collaboration, write and present our art on our own terms. CôEm Collective is an initiative of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN).
ABOUT THE READERS
Bebe Khue was born and raised in Saigon, where she and her family lived under the Communist regime for ten years before escaping to the U.S. as a teenager. She holds a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Virginia and spent several years contributing to the development of Saigon South. A multidisciplinary artist, BeBe is a photographer, educator at the Pacific Art League in Palo Alto, and Artistic Director of the Áo Dài Festival, which celebrates Vietnamese heritage through the elegance of the traditional áo dài. Her deepest passion is writing, inspired by her grandmother’s poetry and storytelling. She is currently working on a memoir about her childhood in Vietnam, while also translating her grandmother’s poems into English and reimagining them through painting.
Jeanie Ngo is a San Francisco writer whose plays have been produced in QAF VI at Bindlestiff Studio, the Shotgun Festival and Spring Fringe Festival at SFSU, SF Olympians Festivals VII, VIII, and X at Exit Theatre, and Pint Sized, Music/Scene, Mixtape, and ShortLived VII at PianoFight. She has also written “MÓN QUÀ YÊU THƯƠNG,” an Asia Entertainment Christmas special. Her short story “Running, Running, Running” was published in the literary magazine Transfer 109 and her poetry has been featured at the Abrams Claghorn Gallery.
Kathy L. Nguyễn is a writer, editor, and Co-Director of literary arts nonprofit Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). Her short stories, essays, and articles have appeared in Fourteen Hills, Fringe, Women’s World, and elsewhere. She co-edited Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora, and was the editor of Nhà, an award-winning diasporic arts & culture magazine. She is a recipient of an Artist Impact Endowment (2024-2026) and a San Francisco Artist grant (2024-2025) from the San Francisco Arts Commission, a Vashon Artist Residency (2025), Tin House Workshop (2024), and Christina Meldrum Memorial Scholarship from the Community of Writers (2023).
Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is a Professor at SF State University. She is the author of This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (2011), and the co-editor of Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora (2014) and of The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora Dialogues (April 2025). She is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), an organization that uplifts Vietnamese cultural productions in the Diaspora.
Vina Vo is a storyteller and facilitator who aims to bridge the cultural, generational, and geographic divide caused by displacement and diaspora. Vina co-leads and directs a writing program called this is my body to support women of color to write and perform their own solo performance/s. She is the co-editor of the anthology this is my body published by Nomadic Press in 2019. She is working on her first novel. She is the co-founder of the Novalia Collective and Creo Tea & Coffee.
THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS & PARTNERS
Black Bird Bookstore and Cafe
San Francisco Public Library
San Francisco Arts Comission
