This past month, I read from my novel to two very different audiences. The first was at The Rubin Museum in New York City as part of an event called Writing Sacred Lhasa.
Reading there with two fellow Tibetan women writers I admire in so many ways, Tenzin Dickyi and Sonam Tsomo, was especially meaningful to me. Although I’ve read with these two women in the past in informal spaces of our own creation to members of our community (ie. often a restaurant), reading our works to a mostly white audience in a space that collects, stores, and presents our culture left me with many mixed emotions and questions — something I will write about one day.
Most of all though, I was grateful to the good people at The Rubin for giving us that space and opportunity to share our work and talk about ourselves as writers and women and Tibetans.
At the end of the month, I read at the KGB Bar in the east village with my fellow artists-in-resident at OMI International. In just a few short weeks, I’ve become close friends with these writers from Indonesia, Catalonia, Jamaica, Switzerland, Finland, Wales, France, Zambia, and the US. I hope we get to cross paths again and again.
My favorite readings that night were the funny and moving poems of Catalan writer Anna Aguilar-Amat and American writer Tung-Hui Hu. Check out their work!
