You guys, I am so stoked to be hosting a concert for one of my favorite music crushes and tour mate, Dao Strom/The Sea and The Mother (of Portland, Oregon) while she’s in the Bay Area for her literary tour (check that out, too!).
I’ve been missing hearing Dao’s live performances, so I asked her if she’d be down to play a show if I hosted the next time she was in the area, and she kindly said yes! Julie Thi Underhill (a fellow Vietnamese diaspora writer, photographer, filmmaker, scholar, who also took one of my favorite photo shoots here), will be reading poetry at the concert. I’m delighted to have both of them – and you! – if you’d like to partake in this treat. Hit me up on my Facebook page messenger if you’re interested. This is one of what I hope to be a series of intimate concerts of my favorite music artists.
Music Videos: “Origin Tale,” “Trade”
When + where: Saturday, February 29th, 5-7pm, Oakland
Featured guests —
dao strom is an artist whose work explores hybridity through melding disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. She makes music as The Sea & The Mother and is the author of five books/works: poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (Hanoi: AJAR Press, 2018); memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, accompanied by a song-cycle, East/West (Press Otherwise, 2015); a collection of novellas, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2006); and a novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books, 2003).
She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Artist Award in Literature and her work has received support from several commissions, including Oregon Arts Commission and National Endowment for the Arts, and grants such as APANO (Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon). Strom is a founding member of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective project of women artists and writers of the Vietnamese diaspora, co-facilitator of a PoC library collective/social engagement project, De-Canon, and the editor of diaCRITICS. Strom was born in Vietnam and grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California. She lives in Portland, Oregon. https://www.daostrom.com/
Julie Thi Underhill is a photographer, filmmaker, visual artist, poet, essayist, historian, and performer. As a mixed-race daughter of the war in Việt Nam, she inherited an abiding concern for the consequences of not only that war but also other wars with high civilian casualties. She has long studied and documented the effects of the American war in Việt Nam, including both countries’ efforts to heal the physical, psychological, spiritual, and cultural legacies of war. Julie has published her writings, poetry, and photography in numerous journals and collections. Julie attended The Evergreen State College (B.A.) and University of California Berkeley (M.A.), where she taught for six years. She has served as the director of the San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival. She is currently a contributor and on the advisory board for diaCRITICS, a blog covering the arts, culture, and politics of the Vietnamese at home and in the diaspora, where she served as a managing editor from 2010 to 2013. Julie is a member of the writer’s collective She Who Has No Master(s) with recent collaborative readings in San Francisco, Portland, and Paris. She is a Lecturer at California College of the Arts, where she teaches in the Writing & Literature program. http://www.jthiunderhill.com/bioc-v-2/
NYLEAU (a.k.a. underwoman and the believers) 