Dr. Lan Duong will read from Nothing Follows, a collection of poetry that traces her family’s arrival to the U.S. in 1975. It narrates their resettlement as they move from Pennsylvania to California during Silicon Valley’s high-tech boom. With each city and street that the poems crisscross, the girl and those around her experience racism, objectification, and sexual violence. In marking the places that she has been, her stories map out the coordinates of a refugee girlhood, one that is spiked with brutality, joy, and longing all the same. Intermixing memoir and poetry, Nothing Follows is an accounting of everything that follows in the wake of war. UCLA Bookstore will sell books at the event.

Lan Duong is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her poetry has appeared in the journals Oberon and Spoon River Review as well as the anthologies Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose and Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing. Her debut collection of poetry, Nothing Follows, is published by Texas Tech UP.