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Photo Credit: BeBe Jacobs
THE NORTON LECTURES
Speaker: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Interlocutor: Mai Der Vang, Assistant Professor of English at Fresno State University
Norton Lecture Five: On Being Minor
What does it mean to be a “minor” writer? From a minority, from a small nation, from the conquered, from the displaced, from spaces that are inevitably politicized or forgotten or overlooked? Art and politics explicitly overlap for the writer who is forced to be minor or who chooses to be minor, and whose aesthetic strategies and archives can and must be eclectic.
Please note the venue for this lecture is Memorial Church.
"On Being Minor" is the fifth of six Norton Lectures with Viet Thanh Nguyen. For all Lecture dates and information, click here. Recordings of Viet's Norton Lectures are available to watch on our YouTube channel.
The Norton Lectures are free and open to the public, but tickets are required. Tickets will be available in advance two weeks prior to each lecture starting at noon, online, in-person at the Smith Campus Center box office, or by phone. Also available in-person at the venue (Memorial Church) starting two hours prior. Handling fees apply for online and phone sales. Limit of four tickets per person. Tickets valid until 5:45pm. Please note new ticket distribution procedure.
Free parking is available at the Broadway Garage, located at 7 Felton Street, between Broadway and Cambridge Streets.
About the Speaker
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. His other books are the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed; a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his son, Ellison. He is a University Professor at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.
Mai Der Vang is the author of two collections of poetry. Her most recent collection, Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the LA Times Book Prize in Poetry, and the California Book Awards. Mai Der’s first book, Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), received the First Book Award of the Academy of American Poets, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Introduction By:
Ju Yon Kim, Patsy Takemoto Mink Professor of English and Harvard College Professor.
About the Norton Lectures
The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925. Harvard’s preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities, the Norton Lectures recognize individuals of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression. The term “poetry” is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts.