Visiting Writers Lecture Series

Dao Strom is a writer and musician whose work melds disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of a novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof (2003), a collection of novellas, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (2006), and an image-text memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People (2015), accompanied by a music album, East/West (2015). She is a 2016 Creative Capital Award Artist. Her work has also received support from the Regional Arts Culture & Council, Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, James Michener Fellowship, and the Nelson Algren Award. Strom is a contributing writer and editor to diacritics.org, the leading blog on Vietnamese diasporic arts and culture, and a co-curator of INHERITORS, a Portland-based hybrid forms literary series exploring the inheritance of violence. Strom was born in Vietnam and grew up in northern California.