ÁCCENTED | Season 6 Premiere: Nam Le and Cathy Linh Che
Welcome
DVAN is thrilled to host our 48th episode of ÁCCENTED, “Ghost Wars: The Intimate Afterlives of Conflict” featuring writers Cathy Linh Che and Chris Santiago in conversation with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen, pulitzer-prize winning author, and Philip Nguyen, Vietnamese-American studies scholar.
About the guests
Chris Santiago is the author of Small Wars Manual, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in April 2025, and Tula, winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. His poems have appeared in POETRY, Conduit, Copper Nickel, Poetry Northwest, Beloit Poetry Journal, American Public Media’s The Slowdown, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, the Mellon Foundation/ACLS, and Kundiman, he is a graduate of Oberlin College and received his PhD from the University of Southern California (USC)’s Literature & Creative Writing Program. He teaches creative writing, sound studies, and Asian American literature in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and has also taught at USC and at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books) and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). 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: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. She teaches as 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.
About the hosts
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. His other books are the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed; a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his son, Ellison. He is a University Professor at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, and the forthcoming children’s book Simone illustrated by Minnie Phan
PHILIP NGUYEN is the emcee for ÁCCENTED: Dialogues in Diaspora presented by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). He teaches Asian American Studies in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, San Jose State University, and is the Executive Director for the Vietnamese American Roundtable, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in California’s South Bay Area. Philip has formerly served as the President of the Union of North American Vietnamese Student Associations (UNAVSA) and as the Co-Chair of the Young Vietnamese Americans (YVA) Committee for PIVOT – The Progressive Vietnamese American Organization.