Victo Ngai, “Easter Egg” outer case illustration for Wishes (Orchard Books, 2021)
Saturday, December 3, 2022, 5pm to 10pm
Opening Night Reception during the Downtown Santa Ana Art Walk
will include special poetry and spoken word performances by Asian American artists (7pm to 8:30pm)
Saturday, December 10, 2022, 1pm to 3pm
Childrens’ Author Book Panel & Childrens’ Book Reading
programming includes family-friendly craft activities
Mượn Thị Văn stitches stories by starlight and by daylight. Some of these stories become books, and some of these books are read around the world. From her acclaimed debut, In a Village by the Sea, to her latest, I Love You Because I Love You, her books have received many distinctions. Mượn Thị Văn’s recent book Wishes, with Victo Ngai, received the Margaret Wise Brown Prize and a California Book Award, and was named the Best Picture Book of the Year by BookPage.
I am René Colato Laínez, the Salvadoran award winning author of many bilingual/ multicultural children’s books. I have a master’s degree from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Writing for Children & Young Adults.
My goal as a writer is to produce good multicultural children’s literature; stories where minority children are portrayed in a positive way, where they can see themselves as heroes, and where they can dream and have hopes for the future. I want to write authentic stories of Latin American children living in the United States.
Van Hoang is the author of Girl Giant and the Monkey King, Girl Giant and the Jade War, and the forthcoming Hidden Tails. She earned her bachelor’s in English at the University of New Mexico and her master’s in library information science at San Jose State University. She was born in Vietnam, grew in up Orange County, California, and now resides in Los Angeles with her husband, kid, and dog.
Saturday, December 17, 2022, 2pm to 3pm
Conversations with artist, Binh Danh
features his artistic practice and new monograph, Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging (Radius Books, 2022)
Books will be available for purchase and signing.
Binh Danh was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the US in 1979. Early in his career, Danh pioneered a technique of printing images directly onto plant matter, activating the plants’ chlorophyll with sunlight. Using this process, Danh printed images associated with the war in Vietnam onto the leaves of tropical plants and grasses. Of this work, Danh explains, “This process deals with the idea of elemental transmigration: the decomposition and composition of matter into other forms. The images of war are part of the leaves, and live inside and outside of them.” Known for his innovative approach to alternative photographic processes, Binh Danh extends and reconsiders the pursuit of pioneering nineteenth-century photographers. For almost a decade, Danh has traveled across the American West, making daguerreotypes of scenic vistas on silver plates. Danh imbues this scenery with a distinctly personal perspective, negotiating his connection as a Vietnamese American with the landscape and history of the United States. This inaugural monograph features two volumes in a slipcase, bringing together three bodies of work and a separate book of essays and memorabilia that serves to contextualize Danh’s work.