The Transformational Image: A Craft Talk by Cathy Linh Che

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | What does an image do? How do images move or surprise us? We will examine how images shift, transform, and ultimately, move a reader. We will look at the works of poets like Sharon Olds, Natalie Diaz, Vievee Francis, Jack Spicer, Anne Carson, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Solmaz Sharif.

Content notice: Poems contain domestic violence, child abuse, ableist vocabulary, drug addiction, unaliving.

Cathy Linh Che is the daughter of Vietnam War refugees. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), and Split (Alice James Books, 2014), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and Association of Asian American Studies’s Best Poetry Book Award. She is also the co-author of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books, 2023). Her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for an Academy Award. She lives in New York City, teaches in the MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles, and is the Executive Director of Kundiman,  a national organization dedicated to the creation and cultivation of Asian American creative writing. We Were the Scenery will be screened as part of Cathy Linh Che’s reading.

Photo credit: Jess X. Snow