Kitchen Talk: Food Histories, Literature, and Afro-Asian Archives in the Americas

AAAYA Board Member, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe, in a joint collaboration wiht her lab Kitchen Marronage, will host the kitchen talk with Monique Truong, covering food histories, literature, and Afro-Asian Archives in the Americas. Moderated Q&A will follow.

Co-sponsored by AAAYA, Afro-Asia Group, and Kitchen Marronage

Speaker Bios:

Monique Truong, '90 is a Vietnamese American novelist, essayist, and librettist. Her debut novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Fiction Book, a Chicago Tribune Favorite Fiction, a Miami Herald Top 10 Books, and winner of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Awards/Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and Bard Fiction Prize, among others. She followed with two more award-winning novels, Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010) and The Sweetest Fruits (Viking, 2019), and all together her books have been translated into fourteen languages to date. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship, John Gardner Fiction Book Award, and John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, among others. Born in Saigon, South Vietnam in 1968, Truong and her parents came to the U.S. as refugees in 1975. She grew up in North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas, and is based now in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A. from Yale University and J.D. from Columbia School of Law.

Tao Leigh Goffe, GSAS '15 is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, DJ, and professor who grew up between the UK and New York. She attended Princeton for her undergraduate degree and received her PhD from Yale University. Dr. Goffe is also the Executive Director of Afro-Asia Group, an organization that centers the intersections of African and Asian diasporas, futurity, and coalition-building. She is an assistant professor of Black studies, gender, and sexuality at Cornell University. Tao is writing two books. The first, BLACK CAPITAL, CHINESE DEBT explores African and Asian diasporic intellectual histories and political life from the nineteenth century to the present through Caribbean cuisine, soundsystems, photography, and gambling practices. The second, AFTER EDEN  (under contract with Doubleday and Penguin Books in the UK) explores islands and how the climate crisis is a racial crisis. Her most recent work Queen Nannies is currently on display at the Institute of Jamaica.