KSW Presents Taking Root: Transforming Personal & Communal Grief
Friday , May 17 6-9pm
Trellis
981 Mission St. SF, CA
Free with registration
Join us for a special edition of KSW Presents as we welcome National Book Award finalist and NEA fellow, Diana Khoi Nguyen, who will be reading from her latest collection, “Root Fractures”. Inspired by the themes of grief and recovery in her writing, we’ve crafted a special event to help us gather in community and healing. Diana will be joined by local artist and professor, Việt Lê for a discussion and Q&A, and professional death doula, Shivani Narang will lead a community grief ritual. Also, join us in the first hour for Refreshments, cash bar, and sign up for a free Reiki or massage session. Program will start at 7pm.
Eastwind Books is our official bookseller. Choose the “supporter” level at checkout to pre-order Diana’s newest collection “Root Fractures”.
Featured Artists
Diana Khoi Nguyen
A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (2024) and Ghost Of(2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her video work has been exhibited at the Miller ICA. Nguyen is a MacDowell and Kundiman fellow, and a member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). She's received an NEA fellowship and awards from the 92Y "Discovery" Poetry and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery contests. She teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Việt Lê (Moderator)
Việt Lê is an academic, artist, writer, and curator whose work centers on spiritualities, trauma, representation, and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas. Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh (Duke University Press, 2021). The art book White Gaze is a collaboration with Latipa (Sming Sming Books, 2019) is in the collections of the Guggenheim, Victoria and Albert Museum, SF MOMA, among others. Lê has taught at UC Irvine, Stanford, USC, and is currently Associate professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
shivani
shivani is a death worker & birth worker specializing in grief support. shivani’s intention is to be of service in ways that prioritize accessibility as well as emotional, mental and spiritual safety. they love to read, write, dance, paint, walk, hike, cook, nap, and tend to the earth. shiv’s relationship to the land, the soil, and the medicine of the plants deeply informs and supports their practice as a death & birth worker.
About the Book
Root Fractures (Simon & Schuster, 2024) by Diana Khoi Nguyen
“In Diana Khoi Nguyen's beautiful and heartbreaking book, Root Fractures, the leaping imagistic declarative sentence becomes fractured and unreliable, as a way to parse and thread memories and feelings. Stacked to the sky, the declaratives become tenuous and subjunctive, leaning under the weight of family, history, and trauma from displacement and a brother's suicide.” —Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World and OBIT