Good evening.
Thank you so much for being here.
I'm so honored to give my first public reading here in Tucson.
I'm just going to make sure I have a timer going.
So I'm so happy that the books are here.
[LAUGHTER]
So you get the books before anybody else.
This cover is very special to me.
The book is dedicated to my grandmother,
and her name was Bun Em, and she was a weaver.
And when she came to this country as a refugee
after the genocide that took place under the Khmer Rouge
regime in the '70s, she was really depressed.
She had lost a lot of loved ones,
including her husband and her eldest son.
And she was-- she was a weaver.
The women at the church that sponsored my family here,
they raised enough money so that she
could have a custom-made loom.
And I would see her all the time weaving at her loom.
And that was how I think she adjusted to this country
and how she processed her grief and her trauma.
So I'm going to begin a poem to honor her.
It is called "The Weaver."
She threaded the loom with one strand of her long silver
hair, which might have kept growing until she was done,
which might have fallen out.
But I would come in and sit beside her on the cushion
without her noticing and she would continue.
Every day I saw this old woman weaving at her loom, rivers
and lakes underneath her hair, the bottom full of silt. I
could see it if I reached with a comb.
And that was when she'd look at me.
Under her hair she kept her oldest son who was out
for a morning swim with swallows swooping down
to touch the water.
It made her happy as she worked on silk dresses
and her hair never ran out.
Sometimes when she was tired, she'd
tie it up and let all the tired animals around her house drink
from her head."