LSU Delta Mouth Reading Series Presents LSU Alumna E.M. Tran and Her Debut Novel
October 14, 2022
Novelist and LSU alumna E.M. Tran will read from and discuss her debut novel, “Daughters of the New Year” on campus Oct. 21.
BATON ROUGE – This October, LSU’s Creative Writing Program will introduce the Delta Mouth Reading Series, an extension of the student-run Delta Mouth Literary Festival. For its first event, the series will bring LSU alumna E.M. Tran to campus to read from and discuss her debut novel, “Daughters of the New Year.” Following the reading, the author will sign books and participate in a conversation with James Nguyen H. Spencer, vice provost and dean of the LSU Graduate School.
The event will be held on the LSU campus in the Grand Salon of the French House on October 21 at 6:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
“Daughters of the New Year” published by Hanover Square/HarperCollins is a lively, spellbinding tale about the extraordinary women within a Vietnamese immigrant family—and the ancient zodiac legend that binds them together. Beginning in present-day New Orleans, the story of the Trung women unfurls to reveal the dramatic events that brought them to America. Moving backwards in time, Tran takes readers into the high school classrooms of New Orleans, to Saigon beauty pageants, to 20th century rubber plantations, traversing a century as the Trungs are both estranged and united by the ghosts of their tumultuous history.
A “haunted story of resilience and survival” (Meng Jin, Little Gods), “Daughters of the New Year” is an addictive, high-wire act of storytelling and mythmaking, illuminating an entire lineage of extraordinary women fighting to reclaim the power they’ve been stripped of for centuries.
Tran is a Vietnamese American writer from New Orleans. Her stories, essays and reviews have been published in the Georgia Review, Joyland Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Harvard Review Online and more. She completed her undergraduate degree at LSU, her MFA at the University of Mississippi and a Ph.D. in creative writing at Ohio University. She currently lives in New Orleans with her husband and two dogs.
The event is co-sponsored by the JF Taylor Endowed Professorship in English, the Asian, Asian American Pacific Islander Faculty and Staff Caucus, the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program and the LSU Ogden Honors College.
The reception following the event is hosted by LSU Dining.
Copies of the novel will be available for purchase at the event.