[Event] Book Talk | Becoming Ghost by Cathy Linh Che

Pre-purchase your copy of the featured title to guarantee your signed copy! This helps ensure that everyone who wants a book goes home with one, in case we sell out at the event. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

The follow-up to her acclaimed poetry debut Split, Becoming Ghost documents Cathy Linh Che’s parents’ experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story. The poetry collection uses persona, speculation, and the golden shovel form as a means of moving Vietnamese voices from the periphery to the center. The speaker’s disownment raises questions about the challenges of using parents as poetic subjects, telling familial stories to a broader public, and the meaning of forgiveness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Split, winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History, and Becoming Ghost. Her writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, and McSweeney’s and she has received awards from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She currently lives in New York City.

IN CONVERSATION WITH

Kyle Lucia Wu is the author of the novel Win Me Something (Tin House Books 2021), an NPR, Electric Lit, & Entropy Best Book of the Year. Kyle is the co-author, with Cathy Linh Che, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books 2023). Kyle is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute and a Part-Time Lecturer at The New School. Kyle has received the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Margins fellowship and residencies from the Byrdcliffe Colony, the Millay Colony, Plympton’s Writing Downtown Residency, Virginia Center for the Creative\ Arts, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center.