THE diaCRITICS
Here's the roster of diaCRITICS. Think you have what it takes to be a diaCRITIC? Use the "Contact Us" page to email the editors and tell them what makes you a good diaCRITIC. We want diaCRITICS all over the world, writing about everything.
Anhvu Buchanan is a San Francisco-based poet with an MFA from San Francisco State University. He co-curates The Living Room Reading Series and collects wonderful internet findings and blogs them.
Ashley Carruthers is a cultural anthropologist who lectures in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. He is interested in issues of identity, homeland, and the arts among Vietnamese diasporic communities in Australia and elsewhere.
Bảo Nguyễn is a scientist at the brain, a teacher at the heart, and a kid at the gut. The only job requirement that has ever resonated with him was: Must be comfortable acting silly, explaining the world to young children and genuinely care about kids. He is a managing editor for diaCRITICS.
Cam Vu earned her doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity at USC where she focused on cultural work in the Vietnamese diaspora. Her book project focuses on affects in diasporic communities. Among other things, she loves to write about food.
Catherine H. Nguyen has studied in Viet Nam and France. Currently a Comparative Literature PhD student at UCLA, Catherine envisions her dissertation as a comparative examination of Anglophone and Francophone diasporic Vietnamese works. She is a managing editor for diaCRITICS.
Dan Duffy is the North Carolina-based editor of the Viet Nam Literature Project, including Viet Nam Literature Comics, publisher of Wikivietlit, and convenor of the Viet Nam Literature Seminar.
Dao Strom is the Oregon-based author of the the novel Grass Roof, Tin Roof and the short story collection The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys. She is also a musician with two albums, Everything that Blooms Wrecks Me and Send Me Home. More info here.
Genevieve Erin O’Brien is a Vietnamese/Irish/American artist, community organizer, and popular educator. She holds an MFA in Studio Art/Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. O’Brien uses performance, video and installation to explore notions of “home” and “homeland.”
Jade Hidle is a Vietnamese-Irish-Norwegian writer and educator. She holds an MFA in creative writing from CSU Long Beach and is working on a PhD in literature at UC San Diego. Her work has appeared in Spot Lit, Word River, and Beside the City of Angels.
Julie Nguyễn is mostly a teacher and sky-gazer who loves to explore SEAsian stories and mythology so she can draw and write her own monsoon flavored fantasy/sci-fi. Julie is a NY’er who likes her streets mean and colorful; and yes, she likes toads a lot but only eats vegetables.
Julie Thi Underhill is an artist, photographer, filmmaker, writer, historian and doctoral candidate in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She specializes in Cham studies, diasporic studies, Asian American film/video, Asian American history, and transnational feminisms. She is a managing editor for diaCRITICS.
Khanh Ho is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College. He is working on a scholarly book reassessing spirituality in Asian American literature. Before academia and for a brief, glorious period of three years, he traveled those parts of the world that could best be enjoyed on a budget and a backpack.
Kim-An Lieberman hails mostly from Seattle and holds a Ph.D. in English, specializing in Vietnamese American literature, from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Breaking the Map: Poems. More info at her website.
Lien Truong lives and works in Northern California, where she teaches painting and drawing at Humboldt State University. Her artwork has been exhibited in numerous venues, including The National Portrait Gallery, Galerie Quynh Contemporary Art and Southern Exposure. More info here.
Linh Dinh is the author of two story collections, Fake House (2000) and Blood and Soap (2004); five books of poems, most recently Some Kind of Cheese Orgy (2009); and a novel, Love Like Hate (2010). He also edited Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (2001).
Michelle Ton is a Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellow in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Nguyen Qui Duc is a journalist, traveler, and author of the memoir Where The Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family. He is also owner of Tadioto, an alternative space in Hanoi for the arts where he organizes exhibitions, screenings, readings, experimental music concerts, discussions and forums.
Nhu Tien Lu earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and an MA in Social Documentation from UC Santa Cruz. Born into the year of the roaming horse, she has lived in 3 countries and 6 states thus far, and has worked in the fields of domestic violence, racial justice, and human trafficking.
Nora Taylor is a Chicago-based art historian of modern and contemporary Vietnamese art and professor of Southeast Asian Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is author of Painters in Hanoi (Hawaii 2004 and NUS 2009) as well as numerous articles on Vietnamese art.
Thuy Vo Dang earned her doctorate in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. She is working on a book examining Vietnamese American anticommunism. Her writing has been published in Amerasia Journal, Le Vietnam au Feminin/Vietnam: Women’s Realities, and Nha Magazine.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Los Angeles-based professor, teacher, critic and fiction writer, author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America and numerous short stories in Best New American Voices, TriQuarterly, Narrative and other magazines. He is the editor of diaCRITICS. More info here.
