Join us for a book reading and discussion with poet Mai Der Vang, featuring her new collection of poetry, AFTERLAND, which has just been published by Graywolf Press. “Afterland” is the debut poetry collection by Mai Der Vang, which is part of her 2016 Walt Whitman Award.

Review of the book by poet Carolyn Forché: “Mai Der Vang confronts the Secret War in Laos, the flight of the Hmong people, and their survival as refugees. That a poet could absorb and transform these experiences in a single generation—incising the page with the personal and collective utterances of both the living and the dead, in luminous imagery and a surprising diction that turns both cathedral and widow into verbs, offering both land and body as swidden (slashed and burned)—is nothing short of astonishing. Here is deep attention, prismatic intelligence, and fearless truth.”