Anna Maria Hong

After a little hiatus, I’m back with this interview with writer, editor, publisher, designer, and scholar Janice Lee. Currently based in Portland, OR, Janice is the author of three books of fiction: KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), and Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), and two books of creative nonfiction: Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015) and The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). 

On the Thursday of the AWP Conference in Portland, OR, I skipped the long line for badges and made my way through the throngs of people chatting, milling purposefully, and sitting and sipping decent coffee along the corridor floors of the Oregon Convention Center to a panel titled  “Vietnam is a Seven-Letter Word.” I was familiar with some of the writers presenting but not all of them, and I was intrigued by the description, which noted that “women of the Vietnamese diaspora [would] offer insight into how writers may elasticize and complicate definitions of one’s various assigned ‘identities’ and lend voice to the silenced, obscured, or overlooked.”

For this week’s commentary, I interviewed the poet, visual artist, and editor Alan Lau. Alan has served as the arts editor for the Seattle-based Asian Pacific Islander American newspaper The International Examiner for over thirty years, curating the paper’s literary, visual, and performing arts coverage and the book review supplement the Pacific Reader.