Mai Der Vang
Award-winning Hmong Poet
Walt Whitman Poetry Award-winner
National Book Award Longlist
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- The Flight of the Hmong
- An Evening with Mai Der Vang
Biography
“Moving and deft, dreamlike and discursive, evolving and devolving, imbued with memory.” –LA Review
“Huge and hallucinatory.” –The Rumpus
Mai Der Vang is the author of two collections of poetry. Her first book, Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), received the First Book Award of the Academy of American Poets, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her second collection, Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), won a 2022 American Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and the LA Times Book Prize in Poetry, and is currently a finalist for the California Book Awards. She was also the co-editor of the anthology How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011).
Yellow Rain is a staggering work of documentary, poetry, and collage. Integrating archival research and declassified documents, Yellow Rain calls out the erasure of a history, the silencing of a people who at the time lacked the capacity and resources to defend and represent themselves. In poems that sing and lament, that contend and question, Vang restores a vital narrative in danger of being lost, and brilliantly explores what it means to have access to the truth and how marginalized groups are often forbidden that access. Of this new collection, Kao Kalia Yang says: “Mai Der Vang’s Yellow Rain spoke to a piece of my heart that has yearned for such a work as this to come forth in response to the layered tragedies of our shared history, to establish a record in which our voices cannot be erased, our bodies forgotten, and our names forsaken. An indictment of the highest and most poetic order.”
About Afterland Carolyn Forché writes: “Afterland has haunted me. I keep returning to read these poems aloud, hearing in them a language at once atavistic, contemporary, and profoundly spiritual. 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.”
Vang’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Tin House, the American Poetry Review, among other journals and anthologies. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. Vang is a member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle where she co-edited How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology. A Kundiman fellow, she has completed residencies at Civitella Ranieri and Hedgebrook. Vang is also the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
Born and raised in Fresno, California, Vang earned degrees from the University of California Berkeley and Columbia University. She teaches in the Creative Writing MFA Program at Fresno State University.
Short Bio
Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of a 2022 American Book Award, and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the First book Award of the Academy of American Poets. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, her poetry has appeared in Tin House, the American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.
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Publications
Yellow Rain
Poetry, 2021
In this staggering work of documentary, poetry, and collage, Mai Der Vang reopens a wrongdoing that deserves a new reckoning. As the United States abandoned them at the end of its war in Vietnam, many Hmong refugees recounted stories of a mysterious substance that fell from planes during their escape from Laos starting in the mid-1970s. This substance, known as “yellow rain,” caused severe illnesses and thousands of deaths. These reports prompted an investigation into allegations that a chemical biological weapon had been used against the Hmong in breach of international treaties. A Cold War scandal erupted, wrapped in partisan debate around chemical arms development versus control. And then, to the world’s astonishment, American scientists argued that yellow rain was the feces of honeybees defecating en masse—still held as the widely accepted explanation. The truth of what happened to the Hmong, to those who experienced and suffered yellow rain, has been ignored and discredited. Integrating archival research and declassified documents, Yellow Rain calls out the erasure of a history, the silencing of a people who at the time lacked the capacity and resources to defend and represent themselves. In poems that sing and lament, that contend and question, Vang restores a vital narrative in danger of being lost, and brilliantly explores what it means to have access to the truth and how marginalized groups are often forbidden that access.
Afterland
Poetry, 2017
Afterland is a powerful, essential collection of poetry that recounts with devastating detail the Hmong exodus from Laos and the fate of thousands of refugees seeking asylum. Mai Der Vang is telling the story of her own family, and by doing so, she also provides an essential history of the Hmong culture’s ongoing resilience in exile. Many of these poems are written in the voices of those fleeing unbearable violence after U.S. forces recruited Hmong fighters in Laos in the Secret War against communism, only to abandon them after that war went awry. That history is little known or understood, but the three hundred thousand Hmong now living in the United States are living proof of its aftermath. With poems of extraordinary force and grace, Afterland holds an original place in American poetry and lands with a sense of humanity saved, of outrage, of a deep tradition broken by war and ocean but still intact, remembered, and lived.
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• Reviews: Yellow Rain by Mai Der Vang – Minneapolis Star Tribune
• Books: Briefly Noted – The New Yorker
• Memory and Metaphor in Mai Der Vang’s Afterland – Ploughshares
• Language as a Way of Speaking Back: An Interview with Mai Der Vang – Writing on the Edge
• The Rail’s Best Books of 2017 – The Brooklyn Rail
Selected Writings
AFTER ALL HAVE GONE
I once carried my mollusk tune
All the way to the lottery of gods.
Rain was the old funeral choir
That keened of a hemisphere
Moored under lampwings.
Clouds never left. I knew
The lights would shine clearer
If I closed my eyes, just as
I knew the Pacific would teach
Me to sleep before tying my
Name to the flaming. Here I
Am now at the end of amethyst,
Drizzling another lost sunrise
Inside the quilt of your hand.
