![]() | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Kao Kalia Yang | |
---|---|
Born | 1980 Ban Vinai Refugee Camp |
Occupation | Writer |
Language | Hmong |
Nationality | American |
Citizenship | U.S.A. |
Alma mater | Carleton College (BA) Columbia University (MFA) |
Notable works | The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir and The Song Poet |
Website | |
kaokaliayang |
Kao Kalia Yang (born 1980) is a Hmong American writer and author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir from Coffee House Press and The Song Poet from Metropolitan Press. Her work has appeared in the Paj Ntaub Voice Hmong literary journal, "Waterstone~Review," and other publications. She is a contributing writer to On Being's Public Theology Reimagined blog. Additionally, Yang wrote the lyric documentary, The Place Where We Were Born. Yang currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota. [1]
Born in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in December, 1980, Yang came to Minnesota in the summer of 1987, along with her parents and older sister Dawb. [2] Yang says that the move to America was necessary for her parents. Her mother suffered six miscarriages after giving birth to her, and with no male heir, her father was being pressured to find a second wife. He even took his younger daughter on trips with him to visit eligible women in the camp. For Yang's parents, leaving Ban Vinai was not only about finding opportunity for their two daughters, but also rescuing themselves from family and cultural pressure. Yang says that while her sister mastered the English language quickly, she struggled for many years, finally discovering that her gift lay not in the spoken, but in the written word. Yang credits her older sister Dawb, with awakening an interest within her:
[E]verything was a Chinese movie in her head. So she would read Jack and the Beanstalk ... [and] it became a Chinese drama. So in my head it was never Jack and the Beanstalk; it wasn't even Jack, it was a Chinese drama, flying around. That beanstalk wasn't a beanstalk, it was a mountain, and he was going to get this beautiful flower that would make his ailing mother live for a hundred years. And this is the kind of introduction I had to books.
Yang also credits her 9th grade English teacher, Mrs. Gallatin, with recognizing and encouraging her talents. Upon graduation from Harding High School, she attended Carleton College, though she was by no means certain of her future plans when she began her college career. [3]
Yang graduated from Carleton College in 2003 with a bachelor's degree in American Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and Cross-cultural Studies. Yang received her Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University in New York City. [4] Her graduate studies were supported by a Dean's Fellowship from the School of the Arts and The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. [5]
Beginning at age 12, Yang taught English as a second language to adult refugees. As a student, Yang privately tutored students, and taught creative nonfiction writing workshops to professionals, including professors from Rutgers University and New York University. Yang has also taught the fundamentals of writing to students at Concordia University in St. Paul and courses in composition at St. Catherine University. She was a professor in the English department at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire for the 2010-2011 academic year. [6] In 2014, Yang served as a mentor for the Loft Mentor Series. She taught at North Hennepin Community College in 2015 as visiting faculty in the English Department. Recently, Yang was the Benedict Distinguished Visiting Faculty in American Studies and English at Carleton College. [7]
Nonfiction: [8]
Children's Books: [8]
Kao Kalia Yang has been a recipient of the Alan Page Scholarship, the Gilman International Award, and the Freeman in Asia Scholarship.
Yang was a Columbia University's School of the Arts Dean's fellow, a Paul and Daisy Soros fellow, and a McKnight Arts fellow.
Yang won the 2005 Lantern Book's essay contest for an essay titled "To the Men In My Family Who Love Chickens." [9]
In 2008, Carleton College awarded her with the Spirit of Carleton College Award.
Yang has been the recipient of several Minnesota State Arts Board artist grants.
In 2009 her first book The Latehomecomer won Minnesota Book Awards for memoir/creative nonfiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award—the first book to ever win two awards in the same year. [10] The book was a finalist for a PEN USA Literary Center Award and an Asian American Literary Award. The book remains a bestselling title for Coffee House Press. "The Latehomecomer" is a National Endowment of the Arts' Big Read book.
Yang's second book, The Song Poet, is the winner of the 2017 MN Book Award in Creative Nonfiction/Memoir. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Chautauqua Prize. The book is now a finalist for a PEN USA literary award in nonfiction and the Dayton's Literary Peace Prize.
In 2020 Yang's children's book A Map into the World, illustrated by Seo Kim, received a Charlotte Zolotow Award Honor for outstanding writing in a picture book. [11]
On September 24, 2012, Radiolab aired a segment on yellow rain and the Hmong people, during which Robert Krulwich interviewed Yang and her uncle Eng Yang. [12] During the two-hour interview, of which less than five minutes was aired, Yang was brought to the point of tears over "Robert's harsh dismissal of my uncle's experience." [13]
Following a public outcry, Krulwich issued an apology on September 30 writing, "I now can hear that my tone was oddly angry. That's not acceptable -- especially when talking to a man who has suffered through a nightmare in Southeast Asia that was beyond horrific." [14]
The podcast itself was later amended on October 5, and according to Yang "On October 7, I received an email from Dean Cappello, the Chief Content Officer at WNYC, notifying me that Radiolab had once more "amended" the Yellow Rain podcast so that Robert could apologize at the end, specifically to Uncle Eng for the harshness of his tone and to me for saying that I was trying to "monopolize" the conversation. I listened to the doctored version. In addition to Robert's apologies—which completely failed to acknowledge the dismissal of our voices and the racism that transpired/s -- Radiolab had simply re-contextualized their position, taken out the laughter at the end, and "cleaned" away incriminating evidence." [13]
Yang noted in particular: "Everybody in the show had a name, a profession, institutional affiliation except Eng Yang, who was identified as "Hmong guy," and me, "his niece." The fact that I am an award-winning writer was ignored. The fact that my uncle was an official radio man and documenter of the Hmong experience to the Thai government during the war was absent." [13]
This incident stirred up issues of white privilege, with many [13] [15] [16] accusing Radiolab and Krulwich of being insensitive to racial matters. [17]
Robert Louis Krulwich is an American radio and television journalist who co-hosted the radio show Radiolab and served as a science correspondent for NPR. He has reported for ABC, CBS, and Pacifica, with assignment pieces for ABC's Nightline and World News Tonight, as well as PBS's Frontline, NOVA, and NOW with Bill Moyers. TV Guide called him "the most inventive network reporter in television", and New York Magazine wrote that he's "the man who simplifies without being simple."
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.
Yellow rain was a 1981 political incident in which the United States Secretary of State Alexander Haig accused the Soviet Union of supplying T-2 mycotoxin to the communist states in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia for use in counterinsurgency warfare. Refugees described many different forms of "attacks", including a sticky yellow liquid falling from planes or helicopters, which was dubbed "yellow rain". The U.S. government alleged that over ten thousand people had been killed in attacks using these supposed chemical weapons. The Soviets denied these claims and an initial United Nations investigation was inconclusive.
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.
Mai Neng Moua is a Hmong-American writer and a founder of the Paj Ntaub Voice, a Hmong literary magazine. She is also the editor of the first anthology of Hmong American writers, Bamboo Among the Oaks.
May Lee-Yang, also known as May Lee, is a Hmong American playwright, poet, prose writer, performance artist and community activist in Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. She was born in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand and moved to Minnesota as a child with her family. She is also the executive director of the non-profit organization Hmong Arts Connection.
Dia Cha is a notable Laotian American author and academic who has written books for both children and adults.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures is a 1997 book by Anne Fadiman that chronicles the struggles of a Hmong refugee family from Houaysouy, Sainyabuli Province, Laos, the Lees, and their interactions with the health care system in Merced, California. In 2005 Robert Entenmann of St. Olaf College wrote that the book is "certainly the most widely read book on the Hmong experience in America."
Jad Nicholas Abumrad is an American radio host, composer, and producer. He is the founder and former host of the syndicated public radio program Radiolab alongside Robert Krulwich.
Radiolab is a radio program and podcast produced by WNYC, a public radio station based in New York City, and broadcast on more than 570 public radio stations in the United States. The show has earned many industry awards for its "imaginative use of radio" including a National Academies Communication Award and two Peabody Awards.
Patricia Hampl is an American memoirist, writer, lecturer, and educator. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and is one of the founding members of the Loft Literary Center.
Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic and videomaker.
The Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards, or the NEMBA Awards, are awards presented annually for books that "substantially represent northeastern Minnesota in the areas of history, culture, heritage, or lifestyle."
Sofia Samatar is an American scholar, novelist and educator from Indiana.
Louisa Elizabeth Miller, better known as Lulu Miller, is an American writer and Peabody Award-winning science reporter for National Public Radio. Miller's career in radio started as a producer for the WNYC program Radiolab. She helped create the NPR show Invisibilia with Alix Spiegel.
The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, founded by Paul Soros and Daisy Soros in 1997, is a United States postgraduate fellowship for immigrants and children of immigrants. In 2021, the fellowship received 2,445 applications and awarded 30 fellowships for a selection rate of 1.2%. Each fellow receives up to $90,000 in funding toward their graduate education, which can be in any field and at any university at the U.S.. The fellowship, which honors the contributions of immigrants to the U.S., was founded in 1997. In 2010, the couple had contributed a total of $75 million to the organization's charitable trust.
WNYC Studios is a producer and distributor of podcasts and on-demand and broadcast audio. WNYC Studios is a subsidiary of New York Public Radio and is headquartered in New York City.
The Song Poet (2016) is a memoir by Kao Kalia Yang, published by Metropolitan Press. It won the MN Book Award in creative nonfiction/memoir and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Chautauqua Prize.