March 3: Telling Refugee Stories

The global migration crisis has displaced nearly 80 million people, the highest number since World War II, yet stories of refugees rarely make headlines. Kao Kalia Yang and Jessica Goudeau are two writers that tell refugee stories in the United States and abroad, showcasing the diverse experiences of displaced people around the world.

In this virtual Collegeville Connections event, the authors will read from and discuss their recent books, Yang’s Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir, which features the stories of refugees resettled in Minnesota, and Goudeau’s After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America, a book of narrative nonfiction about two refugee women resettled in Austin, Texas. There will be an opportunity for questions and answers at the end of the event.

Wednesday, March 3, 2021
12 – 1 PM, CST

Did you miss this event? Watch a recording below or on Facebook:

Resources mentioned:

• Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang
• After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America by Jessica Goudeau
• Other books, including personal memoir and children’s stories, by Kao Kalia Yang
• Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses
• Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich

Kao Kalia Yang ​​​is an award-winning Hmong-American writer. She is the author of the memoirs The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, The Song Poet, and Somewhere in the Unknown World. Yang is also the author of the children’s books, A Map Into the World, The Shared Room, and The Most Beautiful Thing. She co-edited the ground-breaking collection What God is Honored Here?: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss By and For Indigenous Women and Women of Color. Yang’s literary nonfiction work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the PEN USA literary awards, the Dayton’s Literary Peace Prize, and garnered three Minnesota Book awards. Her children’s books have been listed as an American Library Association Notable Book, a Zolotow Honor, a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, winner of a Minnesota Book Award in Children’s Literature and the Heartland Bookseller’s Award. Kao Kalia Yang is a recipient of the McKnight Fellowship in Prose, the International Institute of Minnesota’s Olga Zoltai Award for her community leadership and service to New Americans, and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts’ 2019 Sally Award for Social Impact.

Jessica Goudeau is the author of After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book, and the forthcoming We Were Illegal, also with Viking. She has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, among many other places, and is a former columnist for Catapult. She produced projects for Teen Vogue (“Ask a Syrian Girl”) and “A Line Birds Cannot See,” a documentary about a young girl who crossed the border into the US on her own that was distributed by The New Yorker. She has a PhD in literature from the University of Texas and served as a Mellon Writing Fellow and Interim Writing Center Director at Southwestern University. Goudeau has spent more than a decade working with refugees in Austin, TX and is the co-founder of Hill Tribers, a nonprofit that provided supplemental income for Burmese refugee artisans for seven years.