The Song Poet: Best memoir of 2016 – Library Journal
Yang’s second stellar memoir (after the The Latehomecomer) takes readers back to the mountains of Laos, to her father’s birth and childhood, through the French occupation, and finally to the turbulent war that led to the family fleeing through the jungle to a refugee camp in Thailand and ultimately landing in the American city of […]
May 26, 2016: BBC’s The World
Think of kwv txhiaj as song poetry. Or better yet, think of it like a Hmong version of the blues. And in that vein, think of kwv txhiaj the way American writer Ralph Ellison thought of the blues: “an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.” Ellison’s quote starts off a new book about kwv txhiaj and one of its singers, a man named […]
June 3, 2016: MPR Interview with Tom Weber
When Kao Kalia Yang told her father she planned to write a book about him, he laughed. “‘No one wants to read a book about a man like me when you can read books about men like Barack Obama’,” Yang remembers him saying. But she persisted. “My stubborn heart wanted to prove him wrong.” Read […]
