This is a past event

Hosted by Jennifer Acker ’00, editor-in-chief of The Common, part of LitFest 2022 and in partnership with the Presidential Scholars Program.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize, was a Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner and made the finalist list for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Nguyen and his family came to the United States as refugees during the Vietnam War in 1975. As he grew up in America, he began to notice that most movies and books about the war focused on Americans while the Vietnamese were silenced and erased. He was inspired by this lack of representation to write about the war from a Vietnamese perspective, globally reimagining what we thought we knew about the conflict. Nguyen is a MacArthur Fellow. Along with teaching at the University of Southern California, he works as a cultural critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times.

Contact Info

Darryl Harper
(413) 542-5870
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