REFUGENIUS

I mainly write poems and short stories.

 

My first picture book WHEN EVERYTHING WAS EVERYTHING (Full Circle Publishing $18.95) is available now.

It is illustrated by Cori Nakamura Lin with a forward written by Bao Phi.

I was lucky enough to have some kind words from my heroes in the literary world:

 

I’ve never read a children’s book where I have shared so much with the author, from the streets we lived on, the haircuts we had, the cucumber fields we walked, right down to the food shelves and the wars we come from. “When Everything was Everything” is a singularly important book for all of us who inhabit the Southeast Asian refugee experience, for those of us who have been poor, new to English, we who are perpetually perceived as strangers here. This book makes a home on the children’s shelves for the little girls we were and the women we have become.     

--Kao Kalia Yang, author of The Latehomecomer and The Song Poet

 

This beautiful and detailed unfolding of memories from a Lao American girlhood vividly captures the author's family life in gorgeously illustrated moments and scenes. Child and adult readers alike from every American cultural background, and beyond, will be transported into the intimacy, love, outsider struggles, and hard work, that was Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay's family's daily life in Minnesota.  
--Sun Yung Shin, author of Cooper's Lesson, a bilingual Korean-English illustrated book for children

 

A girl of color dreamscape, a refugeescape, that gives us "resettlement" in all its wonders and sorrows, its intimacies and dislocations, its early mornings and missed expiration dates, its Funyuns and bowl cuts.

--Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, Curator for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and editor of The Asian American Literary Review