Blue Dragon, White Tiger: Co-Writing Workshop

ADMISSION:
Admission is free and open to current USC students only. RSVP beginning Tuesday, September 2, at 10 a.m.

RSVP

DESCRIPTION:
A day after the panel discussion “Recovering Blue Dragon, White Tiger: Vietnamese Diasporic Literature,” USC students are invited to generate new work with award-winning authors Cathy Linh Che and André Dao, who will offer strategies for approaching the blank page and insight into their own writing practices. Che wil lead students through an exercise generating poetry through divination and magic while Dao will offer strateies for writing with and through our ghosts—literary, political and familial. Please bring a short text that haunts you in some way—it might be a document related to your personal or family history, an essay or article that you can't quite shake or an excerpt from a writer whose voice keeps returning. Through these poetry and prose sessions, students will be guided in approaching the blank page and gaining insight into their own writing practices. All majors and levels of experience are welcome!

Bios:

The daughter of Vietnam War refugees, Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost and Split, winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. She is also a co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History. Her writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, and McSweeney’s. She has received awards from Bread Loaf, Tin House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and MacDowell. Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award for Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. She teaches as a member of the core faculty in poetry at the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and works as executive director at Kundiman. She lives in New York City.

André Dao is an author and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. His debut novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Prize. In 2024, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. Dao was awarded the 2024 Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism for essays published in The Saturday Paper, Meanjin, and Liminal. He is the cofounder of Behind the Wire, the award-winning oral history project documenting the stories of the adults and children who have been detained by the Australian government after seeking asylum in Australia. His work for Behind the Wire includes a Quill Award–winning article for The Saturday Paper and the Walkley Award–winning podcast The Messenger. He coedited Behind the Wire’s collection of literary oral histories, They Cannot Take the Sky.

Related Event:
Blue Dragon, White Tiger: Recovering Vietnamese Diasporic Literature and Reclaiming History
Tuesday, October 21, 2025, at 7 p.m.
Joyce J. Cammilleri Hall
For more info, click HERE.

Presented by USC Visions and Voices. Organized by Neelanjana Banerjee (Kaya Press), Kaitlin Hsu (Kaya Press), Peter Limthongviratn (Asian Pacific American Student Services), and Sydney Van To (Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network).