News
2025 Molly Aviva Brodak Award for Bravery in Poetics
Glass Orchid is thrilled to announce the recipient of the 2025 Molly Aviva Brodak Award for Bravery in Poetics, a prize awarded to an artist of distinctively independent vision and approach.
This year’s winner is Frankie Tran, the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma Press, 2018) and creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, community, and identity. Frankie will receive a $10,000 no-strings-attached grant to recognize and support their work.
Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Ashley Bryan Fellows 2023
The 2023 Bryan Fellows include (below, clockwise from left to right, after Ashley Bryan himself) educator, writer, and performer Linda Ashe-Ford, artist, writer, and community organizer Dania Bowie, writer and graphic designer Kendric Chua, writer, mother, and boat captain Minquansis Sapiel, and poet and community organizer Stacey Tran.
Navigating Diaspora with Poetry
Nov. 22, 2019 // Max Nobel
“Khi Nao, Tran, and Strom, each from different generations and separated from Vietnam to different degrees, came together in a Google document. They wrote about food, the relationships it’s a part of, what it brings out of us, the other ways in which it can provide nourishment, one after the other contributing to a shared creative space to a single work.“
Visiting Writers Series: She Who Has No Master(s)
nov. 14, 2019 // Portland, OR
She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of multi-voiced collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through a collaborative art process and social engagement interaction(s), they endeavor to bring into concert the voices of women writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. They define writing as art that has storytelling at its core, but may express itself in hybrid, performance, visual, musical/aural, and interdisciplinary forms.
She Who Has No Master(s): Food, Memory, Mythology
oct. 28, 2019 // Las Vegas, NV
Spend a decadent evening with Vietnamese poets, writers, performance artists Dao Strom, Stacey Tran, and Vi Khi Nao. With Vietnamese cuisine like bánh cuốn or cuộn giấy or bánh xèo, Strom, Tran, and Nao explore the imagined future of language and food through matriarchal mythologies. Collaborate in a performance-based, sculptural Vietnamese feast made of words, food, and diaspora.
Against Nature
Oct. 19-20, 2019 // Los Angeles, CA
Against Nature, sponsored by the MFA in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary's University, will bring together poets, novelists, essayists, and performance artists to explore writing that is experimental, contrary, given to skepticism, and above all, innovative.
&Now 2019: Points of Convergence
Sep. 19-22, 2019 // Bothell, WA
The literary world is both a microcosm and litmus for issues that have rocked the nation and the world. &NOW 2019 POINTS OF CONVERGENCE will provide a space for conversations, performances and readings that seek to articulate, bridge, or resolve these conflicts. A point is a location and also a salient detail. No effort is too big or too small to create a crack in the edifice that locks us in.
Poet Bill Carty reads from his debut collection, HUGE CLOUDY, with poets Stacey Tran and James Gendron
Aug. 14, 2019 // Portland, ME
Hosted by Print: A Bookstore
Poetry Marathon Reading at the Great Stone Barn
JUL. 13, 2019 // MOUNT LEBANON, NY
Join Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon and the Mt. Lebanon Residency in the vault of the historic Great Stone Barn for this day full of poetry! Reading all day and dancing into the night, all while enjoying snacks, craft beer, and good company - that is what this community event is all about. Bring your friends and come hang out with us!
ℱℯℯ𝓁 𝒯𝓇𝒾𝓅 𝓃ℴ. 1
Jun. 22, 2019 // Montreal, QC
Love readings but tired of indoor voices? Looking to combine the pleasures of literature with the emotional charge of breaking a rule? Introducing feel trip™, an ad-hoc reading series for the outdoorsy aesthete. For the first incarnation of feel trip™ we're throwing a bonfire reading on the steppes of Mont Royal. It's going to be romantic and wonderful, equal parts teenage nostalgia, solstice celebration, and Dead Poets Society cosplay event.
Chat Club PVD Vol. 3 at AS220 Main Stage
May 8, 2019 // PRovidence, RI
Join us for the third volume of Chat Club PVD, a new experimental performance cabaret and salon series!
Asian American Narratives: A Reading & Discussion
Apr. 19, 2019 // Pawtucket, RI
Race and ethnicity; self-invention and identity; visibility and representation. An author reading and panel discussion on Asian American narratives in literature and the themes, forms, and contexts that they explore. Join us as poets Tina Cane, Stine An, and Stacey Tran read from their respective creative works and discuss their views on the Asian American literary landscape. Discussion will be led by poet and professor Mary-Kim Arnold.
On the 'Vietnam is a Seven-Letter Word' Panel at AWP
Apr. 12, 2019 // Anna Maria Hong
“On the Thursday of the AWP Conference in Portland, OR, I skipped the long line for badges and made my way through the throngs of people chatting, milling purposefully, and sitting and sipping decent coffee along the corridor floors of the Oregon Convention Center to a panel titled ‘Vietnam is a Seven-Letter Word.’ […] I was intrigued by the description, which noted that ‘women of the Vietnamese diaspora [would] offer insight into how writers may elasticize and complicate definitions of one’s various assigned identities and lend voice to the silenced, obscured, or overlooked.’“
SPD 50th Anniversary Party & Karaoke
Mar. 29, 2019 // Portland, OR
Join Small Press Distribution at #AWP19, together with a cavalcade of publishers and singing poets, for our 50th-anniversary celebration. It kicks off with a poetry reading featuring Gramma Poetry, City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, Ugly Duckling Presse, Birds, LLC, Nightboat Books, and Krupskaya! Followed by . . . Poet's Karaoke!
Emily Sieu Liebowitz, Stacey Tran & Christine Shan Shan Hou
Feb. 28, 2019 // Brooklyn, NY
Please join us at Berl's for an gathering of poetry and conversation with Gramma/Black Ocean authors.
Reading Across America: Have Your Poetry and Eat It, Too
Jan. 16, 2018 // Laura Winnick
“The only worthy reason to leave my warm, cozy apartment on the first rainy weekend of December was in the pursuit of poetry. I was looking for an event that was lived and embodied, beyond a literary experience. Thankfully, I found it in Tender Table.“
Creative Minds: Tender Table with She Who Has No Master(s)
Jan. 13, 2019 // San José, CA
Join She Who Has No Master(s) at San José Museum of Art for a conversation about our connections to food, family, identity. She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of DVAN (Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network) and a collective of women and gender-nonconforming writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. This program is presented in partnership with the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Creative Minds is a series of programs that give the public the chance to meet and hear from artists and experience in creativity in action.
An Interview with She Who Has No Master(s)
Jan. 9, 2019 // Juliet Dang
“Near the end of last February, I saw an event floating in my FB newsfeed entitled Soap for the dogs x She Who Has No Master(s). It caught my eye because I noticed the names of three Viet women: Vi Khi Nao, Dao Strom, and Stacey Tran. I must go, I must support, were the words running through my head.“
BEST OF 2018: BEST POETRY BOOKS & POETRY COLLECTIONS
Dec. 3, 2018 // Entropy Magazine
“Bilingually laced and sensually pulled from the taut form of her enigmatic being, Stacey Tran’s SOAP FOR THE DOGS is a refreshing gastronomic architecture made of razor-sharp, ancestral ingredients, chic aphoristic haikus, and narratively charged self-contained imperial, experimental lines of terse, stark prose. It’s minimal without sacrificing depth and verve.” —Vi Khi Nao
Passwords: Robert Lax with John Beer, Michael N. McGregor & Stacey Tran
Nov. 30, 2018 // New York, NY
A Roman Catholic convert, Lax abandoned New York City literary life for seclusion on the islands of Greece, where he moved in 1962 and continued to write minimalist poems for 30 years, earning him a following by major poets from Cummings to Ginsberg to Levertov, even as mainstream academic circles ignored his work. This tribute reading and conversation honors the late poet on the evening of his birthday and on the occasion of the reissue of his 33 Poems.
Missed Connection: Poetry of Faith and Family
Nov. 10, 2018 // Portland, OR
The complications of family—the ones we are born into and the ones we make ourselves—and of faith of all kinds preoccupy these three poets. Anis Mojgani’s latest collection, In the Pockets of Small Gods, explores what we do with grief and the many kinds of sorrow in surreal, vulnerable yet frank language. Kristen Tracy’s Half-Hazard follows her from a small Mormon farming community out into the forbidden word, full of near misses, would-be tragedies, and luck. Soap for the Dogs, Stacey Tran’s debut collection, teems with images of family and food as she explores history, memory, and time. Moderated by Neil Aitken, author of Babbage’s Dream.
Lindy West, Kate Durbin, Stacey Tran
Jun. 23, 2018 // Seattle, WA
This reading kicks off Gramma Poetry's quarterly series, which pairs national writers with local talent. You'll want to keep up with this one.
Stacey Tran, Amanda Choo Quan & Ana Cecilia Alvarez
May 26, 2018 // Los Angeles, CA
Hosted by Poetic Research Bureau
She Who Has No Master(s) at SF Asian Art Museum
May 5-6, 2018 // San Francisco, CA
Our event on May 5th at the International Hotel is in collaboration with SFSU students, engaging around themes of how Asian bodies are impacted by the #metoo movement.
Our main event will be on May 6th at the Asian Art Museum, with a multi-voiced poetry performance in the morning, followed by individual pop-up readings in the gallery in the afternoon.
Shayla Lawson, Dan Kaplan, Stacey Tran
Apr. 22, 2018 // Portland, OR
A trio of poets celebrate National Poetry Month with readings from their latest collections: Shayla Lawson with I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean, Dan Kaplan with Instant Killer Wig, and Stacey Tran with Soap for the Dogs.
Haft-Seen, a Modern Miscellany
Apr. 19, 2019 // Becky Win
“Haft-Seen is a piece of collaborative storytelling that engages a wide range of the storytelling “senses”—oral/anecdotal, oral/poetic, aural/musical, and image—while also seamlessly integrating a multilingual presence that traverses Farsi, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and English. We read subtitles in English, but sonically we slip between the languages and from one continent of memory to the next, with no jarring; the movement is harmonious and flows, which speaks also to the tenor of interaction between the distinct cultural threads in this collaboration.“ —Dao Strom
Words As Playground And Memory Lab: The Poems Of Stacey Tran
Apr. 7, 2018 // April Baer
“Stacey Tran’s writing process isn’t radically different than many of her contemporaries’. But she’s collaging words and phrases as a way to open new doors on meaning. And she does have ideas about jumpstarting the form.“
At Tender Table, Women and Nonbinary People of Color Share Stories of Food and Family
Feb. 27, 2018 // Kelly Clarke
“To poet Stacey Tran, a bowl of noodles is rarely, if ever, just a bowl of noodles: they’re a trip down memory lane, a writing prompt, and an invitation to talk about the intense crossroads of food, identity, and culture.“
Saferacks for Memory: Minh Nguyen & Stacey Tran in Conversation
Feb. 21, 2018
Full interview available upon request.
Brandon Shimoda and Stacey Tran
Feb. 7, 2018 // Marylhurst, OR
Marylhurst Reading Series: Brandon Shimoda and Stacey Tran will read from their recent books of poems.
Stacey Tran in conversation with Vi Khi Nao
May 5, 2017 // Cosmonauts Avenue
“What do you think should be the national fruit of Vietnam, if you had to choose one fruit in the world?“