MISSION + ABOUT
She Who Has No Master(s) is a collective of womxn and nonbinary writers of the Vietnamese diaspora who engage in collaborative, polyvocal, and hybrid-poetic works to enact a politics of connection across diasporic boundaries. Through a collaborative writing and art process, SWHNM explores multi-voiced collectivity, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diaspora. SWHNM has a fluid and evolving membership.
Our Mission
As a collective of Vietnamese and SE Asian writers, poets, performers, and scholars engaging with questions of diaspora, marginality, and refugee-immigrant subjectivity, we use our collaborative artistic practice to enact a poetics of engagement and a community of repair and possibility. We see collaboration as a concerted act of renewal for both the individual, and the collective of individuals. As Trinh Thi Minh Ha says, “Displacement involves the invention of new forms of subjectivities, of pleasures, of intensities, of relations.” Through our process of investigating these subjectivities of displacement, we posit multi-voiced collectivity/collective authorship as a new paradigm that challenges dominant notions of gendered roles, identity, and experience. We gather also around the impulse to explore — rigorously, uniquely, provocatively — what it means to define and undefine the “feminine” experience through a diasporic lens.
Our collaborative work has included image-text works, video poems, photography, poetry-art installation, performance, chapbooks, literary translations, and interdisciplinary, multilingual, polyvocal works. We have published poetry in Poetry, BOMB, AJAR Journal, and performed at venues such as Black Mountain Institute, SF Asian Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, American Library in Paris, and others. We have exhibited poetry and visual art at George S. & Dolores Doré Eccles Art Gallery and in the Jade Wave Rising exhibit, curated by Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA). Additionally, we have presented panels at the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conferences.
In recognition of the complexity of intergenerational influences on our diasporic beings/bearings, and with a desire to orient toward interdependence, mutuality, and unfolding, we engage in a practice of kinship through mentorship activities, including our mentorship program launched in 2022, which provides one-on-one creative writing guidance and collaboration opportunities to aspiring writers and artists based globally. These mentorship activities are uniquely designed for and led by women and nonbinary writers of the Vietnamese and SE Asian diaspora.
History + Structure
She Who Has No Master(s) was founded in 2015 as a project of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). In 2022 SWHNM separated from DVAN to become our own literary arts collective guided by an ethos of shared creative leadership.
Contact
Email: she.who.has.no.masters@gmail.com
"Yellow Echoes" photo + poetry project (works in progress)
Image-Text poems from "Would That", published in Poetry Magazine (Nov 2022)
SWHNM poetry & durian event ("Food, Memory, Mythology") at Black Mountain Institute, NV
She Who Has No Master(s) in Corsica & Paris, France, 2017
First SWHNM collaborative reading, Portland OR, 2016
@shewhohasnomasters on IG :
