Creator
Peuo Tuy
Khmer American spoken word poet and community organizer who helped found the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association.
Peuo Tuy is a Khmer American spoken word poet, workshop instructor and community organizer, and the author of Khmer Girl (2014).[1][2] She is a founding member and former executive director of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association.[3]
Life and career
Tuy survived the Khmer Genocide and came to the United States as a first-generation Cambodian refugee. After fleeing Cambodia she lived in three refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines, and she began a new life in the United States in 1983.[4] She grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, and lived most of her adult life in New York City.[3] She moved to New York in 1999, and she regards the move as the turning point when she found her identity through spoken word poetry.[2] She studied Africana studies at Hunter College and later earned a master's degree in education.[4][5] She has since lived in Minnesota, where she has studied for a master's degree in special education at the University of St. Thomas.[3]
Tuy was one of the founders of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association in Lowell, a nonprofit for writers of the Cambodian diaspora, and she served as its executive director.[1][5][6] She worked with the association's team to gather stories for the genealogy issue of its zine, The Stilt House, which carries her pieces "On Our Living Room Floor," "Dear Mother" and "He Prayed To Be On Earth."[3]
Poetry
Khmer Girl, published in 2014, is a self-published book of storytelling poems.[1][7] It draws on the traumas of her life: the escape from the killing fields of Cambodia, life in refugee camps, and the inequities immigrants faced in the United States.[1][7] It also speaks of life as a dark-skinned Southeast Asian woman in America, from self-hate to the search for self-love and acceptance.[7] The book includes "She raises her shovels and hoes high," a poem dedicated to women and to the Vietnamese people.[6] Her poem "Skin Lighteners" deals with the confusion between her Khmer and American identities.[4]
Her later poems include "We Stay Tight and Close at Sea," in which people gather clams, snails and crabs in the ocean, and "Waiting for the Morning Breakfast," which names the Cambodian rice porridge babaw kreung.[5] Her further collection, Neon Light Brights, has been announced as forthcoming.[1] Her work has appeared in Art Papers (2016), on WHYY (2017) and in other online publications, anthologies and magazines.[1][5]
Performance and teaching
In her spoken word performances Tuy takes up race, racism, orientalism, sexism, immigrant and refugee life, militarism and color. She uses her own poems and those of other poets in healing workshops for underserved and immigrant communities and communities of color.[2] On a visit for the Miami Book Fair's Big Read series on Cambodian history and culture, she gave talks and workshops on trauma and healing through poetry at Miami Dade College and area high schools.[2] In April 2019 she presented "Past, Present, Future Refugee Experience in America" to students in the SHINE program at Hamilton College.[4]
She has appeared at Harvard Law School, the Massachusetts State House, the Miami Book Fair, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Bowery Poetry Club, the Harlem Book Fair, the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Cambodian Communities Council and the 2017 Minnesota Fringe Festival.[1] In July 2017 she was one of three featured poets, with Bao Phi and Bryan Thao Worra, at the Southeast Asian American Studies Conference in Lowell.[8] On July 11, 2022, she performed at Theater Mu's Selapak: A Celebration of Khmer Artistry at the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis.[9]
Video projects featuring her include Urbintel's HerStory spoken word tour (2005) and Futurographies: Cambodia-USA-France (2016), curated by Parsons School of Design at The New School, which traveled to Cambodia and France in spring 2016.[1][7]
Recognition
- Grant, Long Beach Arts Council
- Pushcart Prize nomination, for "Hasbro Neon Light Brights" (2017)
- Florida Literary Arts Coalition Writers' Circuit book tour (2018 to 2019)
- Grant, Critical Refugees Studies Collective (2019)[5][9]
- Finalist, Jerome Foundation
- Honorable mention, McKnight Foundation[10]
Works
- Khmer Girl (Book)
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Peuo Tuy, Wikipedia
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Miami Book Fair, Poetry and its healing power: interview with Khmer Girl poet Peuo Tuy
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Cambodian American Literary Arts Association, Stilt House: Genealogy contributor notes
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Hamilton College, Khmer-American refugee poet describes her journey (April 11, 2019)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 Richard Howe, "Close at Sea" and other poems by Peuo Tuy (March 2, 2022)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 WHYY, Poem: She raises her shovels and hoes high
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Brooklyn Brainery, Peuo Tuy (2016)
- ↑ Sahtu Press, Engaging the community: the 2017 Southeast Asian American Studies Conference (September 6, 2017)
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Theater Mu, Selapak: A Celebration of Khmer Artistry (2022)
- ↑ Story Arts of Minnesota, Storytelling for Changing Times: tellers, leaders, hosts (2018)