Multi-media Poetry with Mong-Lan, presenting Dusk Aflame: poems & art

Dusk Aflame: poems & art is a bittersweet melange, a delirium of experiences and memories. Buenos Aires looms large with elegiac, nocturnal footsteps:  on the edge of chaos and accidents waiting to happen. Buenos Aires, womb and capital of the tango, a melancholic music and sultry dance created by men and women who felt a need for the embrace. Death aspires to be a character here, and Dusk, too, female, animistic. On a lighter note, Mong-Lan continues with her cherished theme--love poems to nourishing delectables, like persimmon, rice, and sesame seed.  Dusk Aflame includes odes to the body, to the South, New Orleans, Houston, Galveston, and an island off the coast of Thailand. Jazz in poetry, in rhythm to the syncopations of life, to the tango, all comes together in a voice and world vision that is uniquely Mong-Lan's. 

Mong-Lan's lyrical brush and ink paintings accompany her poems in a poetic dance of movement, providing a visual resonance and portent to her work. Her vital virtuoso strokes assume their own characters and lives of their own. 

Suggested donation:  $7

Mộng-Lan, writer, former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Fulbright Scholar, has published seven books of poetry & artwork, and three chapbooks. She has won prizes such as the Juniper Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Awards, among others. A former college professor with the University of Maryland in Tokyo, she left her native Viet Nam on the last day of the evacuation of Sai Gon. Also a musician and composer, she has released nine albums of jazz piano and tangos, which showcase her poetry. As a visual artist, her artwork has been exhibited in galleries and in museums such as the Dallas Museum of Art and in public exhibitions in Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Bali and Buenos Aires. Mong-Lan as a dancer has studied ballet, jazz and flamenco, and has specialized as a tango dancer, performer, and teacher, having over twenty years of tango dance experience, in Buenos Aires, San Francisco, New York City, Tokyo, Bangkok, Hanoi, and elsewhere.