Writing Our Ghosts: What to Do With Family History That Haunts
In partnership with KUNDIMAN: Featuring CATHY LINH CHE & KAT CHOW

1:45 pm – 2:45 pm
31st Street & Barclay Street
Waverly Neighborhood

What does it mean to write to, or in remembrance of, our family’s ghosts? In partnership with KUNDIMAN, this reading and conversation, CATHY LINH CHE (executive director of Kundiman and author of Becoming Ghost and Split) and KAT CHOW (author of Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir) will read from their works, discuss how they have contended with their familial histories via their creative practices, and address how writing out these ghosts can provide us with a more whole understanding of our collective past, present, and future. Cathy Linh Che’s Becoming Ghost “is a new masterpiece of American love lyric, in the vein of Rita Dove’s timeless Thomas and Beulah or Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. She co-authored An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History, which Viet Thanh Nguyen writes is the “Personal and political, playful and provocative, this rhyming guide brilliantly condenses rich, complicated Asian American histories. It’s an A to Z book that isn’t the last word on Asian American cultures but rather the beginning of many conversations.” Her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. Kat Chow is a journalist and the author of Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir, “a memorial to her mother delivered in a graceful, captivating voice. … A certain kind of sorrow lingers because a part of us wants it and wills it to persist, and Chow artfully and intelligently maps which kind of grief this is” says Gaiutra Bahadur for The New York Times Book Review. Kundiman is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature.