Cathy Linh Che: Poetry Reading & Film Screening

Please join us for a poetry reading and film screening with award-winning poet, filmmaker, and multi-disciplinary artist, Cathy Linh Che on Thursday, October 16 at 3:30 pm at Mosher Alumni House. Cathy Linh Che will be screening a short documentary film, We Were the Scenery, and reading from her collection of poems, Becoming Ghost. In these new, acclaimed works, Che moves Vietnamese voices from the periphery to the center, chronicling her parents’ experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and were then cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now.

Cathy Linh Che teaches as Core Faculty in Poetry at the low-residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and works as Executive Director at Kundiman. She is the author of the poetry books Becoming Ghost and Split. She is also the co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History. Her writing has been published in The New Republic, Best American Poetry, and The Nation, and she has received awards from MacDowell, the Asian Cultural Council, and Bread Loaf. Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed, and her documentary short film We Were The Scenery premiered at Sundance in 2025.

Presented by the UCSB Department of English. Sponsored by the American Cultures & Global Contexts Center, Department of Asian American Studies, Asian / American Studies Collective, Department of English, Carsey-Wolf Center, Department of Film & Media Studies, Center for Feminist Futures, Department of Global Studies, College of Creative Studies, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Creative Critical Center, MultiCultural Center, and Writing Program.