Join Cathy Linh CHE (ACC 2024), Alex Gallo-Brown, and Paul Hlava Ceballos for an evening of their poetry and short films to celebrate the release of Becoming Ghost. Each author will read from their selected work and screen their short films. Che joins us in Seattle following the screening of We Were the Scenery, winner of the the Short Film Jury Award for Non-Fiction at Sundance Film Festival 2025.

The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

The follow-up to her acclaimed poetry debut Split, Becoming Ghost documents Cathy Linh Che’s parents’ experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story. The poetry collection uses persona, speculation, and the golden shovel form as a means of moving Vietnamese voices from the periphery to the center. The speaker’s disownment raises questions about the challenges of using parents as poetic subjects, telling familial stories to a broader public, and the meaning of forgiveness.