Chay Douangphouxay | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Known for | National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum. |
Notable work | Tawan: The Sun Girl |
Awards | Legacy Fellowship Grant |
Chay Douangphouxay is a Lao-Khmer American artist and activist from Minneapolis. [1] Douangphouxay is a spoken word artist known for covering topics such as race and gender. Through her art, she has sought to redefine the image of Asian-Americans. [2]
Before coming to the United States, Douangphouxay and her family lived in Thai refugee camps from when she was one to three. She has said that America was "the light at the end of the tunnel for us." [2] Her work is inspired by both her time in the refugee camps and her childhood in the projects of Minnesota.
Her first solo chapbook, Remission: Finding Light in the Midst of Social Darkness, was released in 2012 through the 2012 Legacy Fellowship Grant, with the support of Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans and the Minnesota Humanities Center. [3] The book covers topics of gender, race, and class. [1] Her second book, Tawan: The Sun Girl, was published in 2013 as part of the Reading Together project, a collaboration of the Minnesota Humanities Center and the Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans. [4]
Douangphouxay also cofounded the Twin Cities chapter of the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum. [3]
Laos, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic, is the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia. At the heart of the Indochinese Peninsula, Laos is bordered by Myanmar and China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the southeast, and Thailand to the west and southwest. Its capital and largest city is Vientiane.
Minnesota is a state in the Upper Midwestern region of the United States. It is the 12th largest U.S. state in area and the 22nd most populous, with over 5.75 million residents. Minnesota is known as the "Land of 10,000 Lakes" for having more than 14,000 bodies of fresh water covering at least ten acres each; roughly a third of the state is forested; much of the remainder is prairie and farmland. More than 60% of Minnesotans live in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area, known as the "Twin Cities", the state's main political, economic, and cultural hub and the 16th-largest metropolitan area in the U.S. Other minor metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas include Duluth, Mankato, Moorhead, Rochester, and St. Cloud.
The Hmong people are an indigenous group in East and Southeast Asia. In China, the Hmong people are classified as a sub-group of the Miao people. The modern Hmong reside mainly in Southwest China and countries in Southeast Asia such as Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar. There is also a large diasporic community in the United States of more than 300,000. The Hmong diaspora has smaller communities in Australia and South America.
Hmong Americans are Americans of Hmong ancestry. Many Hmong Americans immigrated to the United States as refugees in the late 1970s. Over half of the Hmong population from Laos left the country, or attempted to leave, in 1975, at the culmination of the Laotian Civil War.
Ka Vang is a Hmong-American writer in the United States. Vang was born on a CIA military base, Long Cheng, Laos, at the end of the Vietnam War, and immigrated to the United States in 1980. A fiction writer, poet, playwright, and former journalist, Vang has devoted much of her professional life to capturing Hmong folktales on paper. She is a recipient of the Archibald Bush Artist Fellowship and several other artistic and leadership awards. She is the author of the children's book, Shoua and the Northern Lights Dragon, a finalist for the 23rd Annual Midwest Book Awards in 2012.
Bryan Thao Worra is a Laotian American writer and poet.
The demographics of Minnesota are tracked by the United States Census Bureau, with additional data gathered by the Minnesota State Demographic Center. According to the most recent estimates, Minnesota's population as of 2020 was approximately 5.7 million, making it the 22nd most populous state in the United States. The total fertility rate in Minnesota was roughly 1.87 in 2019, slightly below the replacement rate of 2.1.
Frank Hornstein is an American politician serving in the Minnesota House of Representatives since 2003. A member of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL), Hornstein represents District 61A, which includes parts of the city of Minneapolis in Hennepin County, Minnesota.
Evelyn Seiko Nakano Glenn is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities, she served as founding director of the university's Center for Race and Gender (CRG), a leading U.S. academic center for the study of intersectionality among gender, race and class social groups and institutions. In June 2008, Glenn was elected president of the 15,000-member American Sociological Association. She served as president-elect during the 2008–2009 academic year, assumed her presidency at the annual ASA national convention in San Francisco in August 2009, served as president of the association during the 2009–2010 year, and continued to serve on the ASA governing council as past-president until August 2011. Her presidential address, given at the 2010 meetings in Atlanta, was entitled "Constructing Citizenship: Exclusion, Subordination, and Resistance", and was printed as the lead article in the American Sociological Review.
Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay is a Minnesota-based Lao American spoken word poet, playwright, and community activist. She was born in 1981 in a refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand. In 2020, she received a National Playwright Residency Program grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Malichansouk “Mali” Kouanchao is a Lao American visual artist, web and interactive designer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the subject of a children’s book Mali Under the Night Sky. Her multidisciplinary works explore the relationship between art, transformation, and communal healing.
The Hmong people are a major ethnic group in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area. As of 2000, there were 40,707 ethnic Hmong in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The 2010 U.S. Census stated there were 66,000 ethnic Hmong in Minneapolis-St. Paul, giving it the largest urban Hmong population in the world. Grit Grigoleit, author of "Coming Home? The Integration of Hmong Refugees from Wat Tham Krabok, Thailand, into American Society," wrote that the Minneapolis-St. Paul area "acted as the cultural and socio-political center of Hmong life in the U.S."
Chanida Phaengdara Potter is a Lao American writer, activist and community development strategist in the Lao American and Southeast Asian diaspora communities. She is well known for her work as the founding editor of the internationally acclaimed online publication, Little Laos on the Prairie where voice and visibility of the Lao diaspora experience are amplified. She is the executive director of The SEAD Project , an organization based in Minnesota and Laos aimed at empowering Southeast Asian diaspora communities by bridging the access gap to community, storytelling, languages, heritages and cross-cultural connections and knowledge-sharing through creative workshops and communication tools. She has worked in the nonprofit field on organizing, public affairs, community development, and human rights advocacy.
Sucheng Chan is a Chinese-American author, historian, scholar, and professor. She established the first full-fledged autonomous Department of Asian American Studies at a major U.S. research university and she was the first Asian American woman in the University of California system to hold the title of provost.
Peggy Flanagan is an American politician, community organizer, and Native American activist serving as the 50th lieutenant governor of Minnesota since 2019. A member of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL), Flanagan served in the Minnesota House of Representatives from 2015 to 2019.
Channapha Khamvongsa is the Lao-American former founder and executive director of Legacies of War, a D.C.-based non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to raising awareness about the history and continued effects of the Vietnam War-era bombings in Laos through the use of art, culture, education, and advocacy. In September 2016, President Barack Obama acknowledged Channapha’s advocacy efforts in Laos, when he became the first U.S. President to visit the country.
Gail Chang Bohr is a retired judge from Minnesota. Bohr was elected Second Judicial District judge for Ramsey County, Minnesota in 2008. Bohr served from January 5, 2009 to March 31, 2014, and then served as a senior judge until June 30, 2015. Chang Bohr was executive director of the Children’s Law Center of Minnesota from 1995 to 2008.
Kaohly Her is a Hmong-American politician serving in the Minnesota House of Representatives since 2019. A member of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL), Her represents District 64A, which includes parts of Saint Paul in Ramsey County, Minnesota.
Rita Nakashima Brock is an American feminist scholar, Protestant theologian, activist, and non-profit organization leader. She is Senior Vice President for Moral Injury Programs at Volunteers of America, headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, and a Commissioned Minister in the Christian Church.