We are thrilled to announce Ink & Blood, a new joint imprint focused on Diasporic Vietnamese literature, from Kaya Press and the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network (DVAN). This exciting new project aims to bring Vietnamese literary voices from across the globe to English readers, and has been in the works for the past year, with generous support from donor Stephen CuUnjieng and so many of you! 

The first book to be translated in the Ink and Blood series will be Line Papin’s Les Os des Filles (working title: The Bones of Daughters) (Spring 2022).

To celebrate the launch, DVAN founder and Pulitzer Prize winning-author Viet Thanh Nguyen and Line Papin will be in conversation on Friday June 11, 2021 at 4:30 p.m. PST, on Facebook live on the DVAN Facebook page.

In order to expand Ink & Blood, we want to raise $10,000 by June 18th! Your donation will help support the translation, design, and production of work from Vietnamese writers from around the world, and facilitate the Ink & Blood editorial team to seek out Vietnamese writers, translators, and artists to highlight through this special imprint. 

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DVAN was founded by Nguyen and writer and San Francisco State University professor Isabelle Thuy Pelaud to celebrate and foster diasporic Vietnamese literary voices. Nguyen and Pelaud met as graduate students in 1990s San Francisco, and Pelaud says the name “Ink & Blood” harkens back to the Vietnamese literary group that they were a part of, the precursor to DVAN. 

“The name Ink & Blood was decided on as one that evoked the act of writing intertwined with a history marked by a war whose consequences most of us were all too familiar with,” Pelaud explains. 

Kaya Press is thrilled to collaborate with DVAN and dedicate its publishing expertise towards the Ink & Blood imprint. Ink & Blood will join Kaya’s recently launched Magpie Series in Modern and Contemporary Korean Literature imprint; along with other diasporic imprints coming soon.

DVAN editors chose Papin’s novel after an extensive search for its unique poetic narrative that captures the intergenerational stories of three Vietnamese women. Born in Hanoï in 1995, Line Papin grew up there till the age of ten, before moving to France. At only 25, she already has four critically acclaimed novels to her name: L’éveil (2016 Vocation Prize) Toni (2018), Les os des filles (2019) and Le coeur en laisse (2021).