Greenwich Library’s popular Poet’s Voice program returns on Tuesday, April 4 with two events featuring poet and YA author Thanhhà Lai. At 7:00 pm in the Marx Family Black Box Theater, Lại will talk about how her childhood as a refugee growing up in the U.S. informed her writing career. And just before, at 6:15 pm, also in the Marx Family Black Box Theater, Lai will host a meet-and-greet for students in the 4th-12th grades who would like to discuss her middle-grade and YA books.
Thanhhà Lai is a Vietnamese-American writer whose first novel, Inside Out & Back Again, which was written in verse, won the National Book Award and a Newbery Honor. Her latest, a picture book called Hundred Years of Happiness, was released last year, and a sequel to Inside Out, called When Clouds Touch Us, will be released in May 2023.
Lai was born in Saigon, Vietnam, as the youngest of nine children. During the Fall of Saigon in 1975, 10-year-old Thanhhà, her mother, and her siblings boarded a South Vietnamese Navy ship with the first wave of refugees fleeing the country. Her experience sailing across the Pacific with thousands of adrift countrymen, acclimating to life in Alabama, and learning a new culture and language has provided the backdrop to much of her work, including 2011’s Inside Out & Back Again, 2015’s Listen, Slowly, and her 2019 YA debut Butterfly Yellow, which won the Scott O’Dell Award for best work of historical fiction in 2020.
“When I came up with the prose poem for Inside Out & Back Again, that was precisely to show how Vietnamese is processed in the mind,” Lai has said of her acclaimed story, which was called a “note-perfect evocation of exile, immigration, and arrival” when it won a National Book Award “[The Vietnamese language] is very poetic and has a natural cadence to it, so it lends itself to poetry…if I slip inside a Vietnamese mind, my fingers will type out prose poems.”
Lai earned her Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and her Master’s degree in Fine Arts at New York University. She worked as a reporter at the Orange County Register covering the local Little Saigon community, and later taught composition at Parsons: The New School for Design in New York City. She lives in upstate New York with her husband and daughter.
Poet’s Voice will also present New York Times bestselling poet Kate Baer at Darien Library’s Community Room on Sunday, April 23 at 2:00 pm. Baer’s works include What Kind of Woman, I Hope This Finds You Well, and And Yet. After reading selected passages, Baer will be in conversation with Darien Library Director Kiera Parrott.
The Poet’s Voice series has been supported by the Horace E. Manacher Poetry Fund and Friends of Greenwich and Darien Libraries for more than 45 years; this year, the Library is pleased to partner with the Wilton Library of Wilton, Connecticut, on this event. The Manacher Family has been supporting the Poet’s Voice reading, at Greenwich Library and Darien Library, in honor of Horace and Zelda Manacher since 1977. The goal of the series is to present acclaimed, distinguished, and award-winning poets to the Greenwich community. The Poet’s Voice series has included Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, State and U.S. Poet Laureates, and a Children’s Poet Laureate.
With 1,800 programs and events per year, Greenwich Library seeks to serve as a cultural and intellectual pillar of the community. Take advantage of in-person and online training and enrichment opportunities at the Libraries, including bestselling and local authors, conversations with thought leaders, world-class musicians, dancers, and performers, and timely and age-appropriate technology, science, genealogy, writing, and health workshops. Find an event on the Library’s online calendar.
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