Democracy, War, and Identity: Viet Thanh Nguyen and Cathy Linh Che in Conversation

Authors Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer, A Man of Two Faces) and Cathy Linh Che (Split, Becoming Ghost) share readings of their work and discuss their experience of democracy as Vietnamese American immigrant writers whose work engages vistas of American democracy amidst the legacy and representations of the Vietnam War. A Q&A will follow the readings and conversation.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is perhaps most well know for his novel The Sympathizer, which was a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association. His other books are 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 is a a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is also the author of the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), for The Sympathizer. He is the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston. He co-authored Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book, with his then six-year-old son, Ellison, and his most recent novel is The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer. HBO turned The Sympathizer into a TV series in 2024, directed by Park Chan-wook. Nguyen’s last book was Simone, a children’s book illustrated by Minnie Phan, while his next book is To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other will be forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2025.

Cathy Linh Che has recently joined Antioch University as Core Faculty in the MFA Program. She is a Vietnamese American writer and multidisciplinary artist, the author of two poetry books: Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, and Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press), 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 writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, and McSweeney’s, and she has received awards from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Tin House, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her video installation, Appocalips, is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY. Prior to joining Antioch, Cathy taught creative writing at New York University, Fordham University, the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe, and was a Distinguished Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence at Sierra Nevada College.

This program is offered with support from Antioch Works for Democracy