Reading by Cathy Linh Che

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Poetry at Bennington welcomes Cathy Linh Che for a public reading of their poetry.

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. This film follows the journey of two Vietnam War refugees who, while in a refugee camp in the Philippines, became extras in the movie Apocalypse Now.

Photo credit: Jess X. Snow