Friday, April 27, California and Beyond: Vietnamese American Artists and Writers Symposium, Stanford University, Stanford Humanities Center, 424 St. Teresa St.

Link here

Saturday, April 28, 7pm Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network’s SF Vietnamese American Literary and Art Festival, Reading and Signing, African American Arts and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA

Link here

Wednesday, April 11, 7 pm – Bao Phi and Ed Bok Lee at University of Maryland, Van Munching Hall 1524.

Thursday, April 12 1:15 – 2:45 pm The Poetical is Political: A Creative Conversation on Asian American Organizing Chair: Juliana Hu Pegues, with Michelle Myers, Parag Khandhar, Stevie Peace, and Bao Phi

Also Thursday: April 12, Bao Phi and Ed Bok Lee, Sông I Sing and Whorled, performance and book signing. 4:30 pm, Main Exhibitor’s room

Saturday, April 14, 11:15 am, 2012 Symposium: Asian American Portraits of Encounter Between Image & Word, with David Henry Hwang, Garrett Hongo, Anna Kazumi Stahl, Bao Phi, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Kazim Ali, and Marianne Villanueva. At the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian

There is a certain catalyzing style that comes of utter fearlessness, and the poet Bao Phi has cornered it with his debut poetry collection, Sông I Sing.

Jane Y. Kim, Hyphen magazine

Read the full review here.

I’ve been honored with another wonderful review, from the good people at the Asian American magazine Hyphen. Read it here

Also a good mention of the book at Publisher’s Weekly. Congrats to Coffee House Press! Here Thank you all for supporting the book – the sales number is ridiculous, and a wonderful surprise.

Then, last but not least, we’ve made two “best of 2011″ lists. One by O.G. Asian American journalist and blogger Jeff Yang here.

And the interview of me by Kim-An Lieberman for diaCRTICS made it onto editor Viet Nguyen’s top posts of 2011 here.

Thanks to everyone for the amazing level of support. Peace.

In this strong and angry work of what he calls refugeography, Bao Phi, who has been a performance poet since 1991, wrestles with immigration, class and race in America at sidewalk level… on this song of his very American self, every poem Mr. Phi writes rhymes with the truth.

read the full New York Times review here.

Dana Jennings, the New York Times

Bao Phi’s words are undeniably politically brave and brutally honest—a rarity of a voice much needed.

Ly Vũ Hoàng, Pacific Reader Journal Review

George Uba reads the tribalism, in discursive Asian American poetry, as an ethnographic signifier of resistance to an oppressive and dominant culture, as anti-assimilationist, as privileging the oral over the written, and as more embracing of the polemic than the poetic—all descriptors that resonate through Bao Phi’s poetry…

Professor Greg Choy, Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley
Read the full review here.

First off, a very talented fellow Vietnamese American artist and community organizer whom I have a lot of respect for, and whom I am lucky to call friend, Sahra Nguyen.

Also Kevin Ost-Vollmers was kind enough to devote some space to an interview with me on his awesome blog, Land of a Gazillion Adoptees.

And last but not least, Dr. Ravi Chandra, a fine poet who recently released a dope chapbook himself, wrote about my book on Psychology Today’s website, of all places! Hey, I’m just glad that it’s a positive review of my book on there by brother Ravi, and not an analysis of my psyche.

Bao Phi’s long-awaited debut collection Sông I Sing brings poetry back to the people like nothing else I’ve seen in Vietnamese American culture.

Julie Thi Underhill
Read the full review by Julie Thi Underhill here.

If you have been lucky enough to attend one of Bao Phi’s dynamic spoken-word performances, then you know why his new book Sông I Sing, just released from Coffee House Press, belongs at the top of your must-read list. Slam champion, community activist, HBO Def Poetry Jam alum, Associate Program Director at The Loft Literary Center, and self-proclaimed “geek of color,” Phi writes with a clear sense of purpose. His poems rail against racism, sexism, homophobia, prejudice, and ignorance of every shade – with urgent emotion and no-holds-barred language – all while radiating love and gratitude for the rich spectrum of Vietnamese American and Asian American experiences.