Our Mentorship Program
***Applications Open October 20, 2024***
She Who Has No Master(s) offers creative writing mentorships uniquely designed for and led by women and nonbinary writers of the Vietnamese and SE Asian diaspora. The centering of this perspective is important because in most educational settings the focus on subject matter and perspectives of women/nonbinary SE Asian diasporic women is marginalized, if not totally unaddressed. In offering one-on-one mentorships guided by established writers and artists in our collective, we create a uniquely nourishing experience where aspiring writers can explore, embrace their particularities, and create more expansively. Our mentorships are conducted remotely. The next mentorships cycle will take place in 2025.
To apply for a mentorship, visit our How To Apply page
To learn more about how our mentorships work, visit our Q&A page
Meet Our Mentors for 2025
Photo credit: Jess X. Snow
Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books) and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). She is working on a creative nonfiction manuscript and a short documentary on her parents’ experiences as refugees who played extras on Apocalypse Now. Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY.
Mentor Statement
I am a triple Taurus! A mentorship with me would be very grounded and fairly easygoing. I’m good at organizing regular check-ins, prioritizing your needs first, and making time to discuss your own creative writing. In a typical 30 min session, I think I can look at up to 10 pages of poetry or five pages of prose. My feedback is often verbal, and for poems especially, I believe in the power of a first gut level read. My primary genre is poetry—but I’m also able to provide give feedback on fiction and nonfiction. I also work in collage, film, and performance. I have a strong interest in the poetic image. While I’m not as practiced in providing craft feedback in those areas, I can speak to the experience of being an artist who works collaboratively and across media.
MyLoan Dinh is a multidisciplinary artist. Geographic, social and cultural confluences shape her art-making practice. Drawing inspiration from the shuffling, cross-cultural entanglements and everyday manifestations of identity, memory, and displacement, she works through diverse media—sculpture, mixed-media installation, and performance. Dinh's work is collected and exhibited internationally including the Muhammad Ali Museum, ArtFields, Mint Museum of Art, Ogden Contemporary Arts and Imago Mundi Benetton Foundation. Recent accomplishments include: Arts & Science Council Inaugural Founders Grant Recipient, NC Zeitgeist Foundation Biennial Touring Artist, Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington National Biennial, ArtFields 2nd Place Jury Prize. She is the co-founder of Moving Poets, a multidisciplinary arts organization based in Charlotte and Berlin.
Mentor Statement
My artistic practice is multidisciplinary heavily focused on visual arts and the ways we can communicate through 2D and 3D works, video, installation and performance. My approach as a mentor is establishing a partnership with the mentee based on the foundation of trust, care, sharing, examination, listening, honesty and learning from one another. My goal is to help the mentee do what they do better. My Vietnamese vocabulary is limited therefore I prefer an English fluent mentee. I am flexible on the time zones, although I do believe it is easier to have both of us on Eastern Standard Time.
Sophia Terazawa is the author of three poetry collections, Winter Phoenix (Deep Vellum, 2021), Anon (Deep Vellum, 2023), and the forthcoming Oracular Maladies, a finalist for the 2023 Noemi Press Book Award. She has also published two chapbooks, I AM NOT A WAR (Essay Press, 2016) and Correspondent Medley (Factory Hollow Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She currently teaches poetry and hybrid forms at Virginia Tech as a Visiting Assistant Professor. Her debut novel is forthcoming with Deep Vellum in 2025.
Mentor Statement
I’m a poet and performance artist working between the borders of hybrid forms. Current location: Blacksburg, Virginia. My style of mentorship centers on gentle attention, playfulness, and holistic practices. For example, we might exchange letters by burying words in the earth. I’m also curious about writers attuned to polyrhythm, Lorca’s duende, and Jigglypuff, to name a few themes. How might genre blur with language? Between the living and the dead? Against genocide or the war machine? ///// Vietnamese has long been a site of entanglement in my identity. I couldn’t speak it growing up. I was raised to be Japanese like my father in Texas. I yearned to meet kin between spaces of silence. Pedagogically, this marked me with contemplations of exile and the poetics of extremity. Some favorite writers have been Mahmoud Darwish, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Agha Shahid Ali, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. ///// My primary language is English, but I’m happy to work with all language speakers, even if this means we struggle to communicate, especially if a student welcomes this non-traditional but worthy connection. If our words fail, we can speak in bird calls. Finally, it may be helpful to know that I prefer to meet during daytime hours in Eastern Standard/Daylight Time. Weekends are okay, too.
Abbigail N. Rosewood is the author of the novels If I Had Two Lives and Constellations of Eve. Her fiction and nonfiction works can be found at TIME magazine, Harper Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, PEN America, and others. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and their daughter.
Mentor Statement
My mentorship style is a blend of traditional critique and dialogue. I will ask provocative questions that urge you to explore the unexamined aspects of your work with the aim of making the whole more psychologically nuanced, strengthening the themes, and deepening the connections you’ve already created. Since my reading also informs my mentoring approach: I have a soft spot for unstructured narratives, or structures driven by the character’s internal logic, stories about complicated friendships, motherhood, daughterhood. A few of my favorite writers include Clarice Lispector, Fernando Pessoa, Olga Ravn, Osamu Dazai, Elena Ferrante, Milan Kundera. I like a mix of horror and magic, beauty and the grotesque, the transcendent. I also consume graphic novels, mangas, memoirs, poetry that constantly challenge my assumptions about what literature is. As your mentor, I hope to bring along my curiosity, conviction as well as ambivalence. I think it is more important for literature to ask questions than to purport to know the answer. I would love to work with you on your short stories or novels.
I’m happy to read up to 15 pages double spaced and meet once a month virtually.
Author portrait | Chân dung tác giả
A drawing by | Tranh vẽ của Đinh Trường Chinh
Nhã Thuyên secludedly anchors herself to Hà Nội, Việt Nam and tottering between languages, translations and poetic exchanges. Her most recent books are bất\ \tuẫn: những hiện diện [tự-] vắng trong thơ Việt with its English edition: un\ \martyred: [self-]vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry (Roofbook, USA, 2019) and moon fevers (Tilted Axis Press, UK, 2019). She’s been talking to walls and soliloquies some nonsense when having no other emergencies of life to deal with. Her next book of poetry vị nước (taste of water) has been waiting to see the moon. She is unearthing her notebooks, rubbing her words and learning to quietly speak up with care.
Nhã Thuyên náu mình ở Hà Nội và xoay xở giữa các ngôn ngữ. Cô đang bới chữ từ những cuốn sổ tay bỏ vắng lâu ngày và chậm rãi học nói.
Statement | Chia sẻ:
I am reluctant to be a mentor to anyone, as I am always considering myself a learner toddling in the word-milieu. An open literary mentorship, however, would allow us to simultaneously be a mentor and a mentee in a provisional room where our drawers of sketches and drafts could considerately be open for others' eyes. I hope to be a good interlocutor for you to discuss your ideas, to listen to your fears and hopes, to read closely with you some pages of your manuscripts, and to suggest several edits when it is possible and needed. For many years, I’ve been slowly writing and reading, mostly poetry and essays, in Vietnamese and between languages. For this specific mentorship program that partly aims to connect the community of writers and readers in and outside Vietnam, I expect to meet with writers/poets who engage with writing in Vietnamese where I think my experience might be useful for, and of course, you would not have to be speaking in English when working with me.
Tôi e dè làm một người hướng dẫn, bởi tôi xem mình chỉ là một học trò bỡ ngỡ trong trường chữ. Tuy nhiên, một chương trình gợi dẫn văn chương mở có thể cho ta được làm người hướng dẫn và người học cùng lúc, trong một phòng văn ngẫu tạm nơi ta đủ tin cậy hé ngăn kéo bản nháp và phác thảo cho người khác xem cùng. Tôi mong làm tròn vai một người trò chuyện, cùng bạn luận bàn ý tưởng, nghe bạn tỏ bày phần nào nỗi sợ và cả những trông vọng mơ hồ, đọc cùng bạn thật kĩ vài trang bản thảo và gợi ý dăm ba biên tập nếu cần. Nhiều năm qua, tôi vẫn chậm chạp đọc, viết, chủ yếu là thơ và tiểu luận, bằng tiếng Việt và giữa các ngôn ngữ. Cuối cùng, bởi chương trình này phần nào nhằm kết nối người đọc và người viết trong, ngoài Việt Nam, tôi mong gặp những người gắn kết với việc viết tiếng Việt -- mà kinh nghiệm của tôi biết đâu chừng đôi phần hữu ích, và hẳn nhiên, bạn không cần phải thạo tiếng Anh khi làm việc với tôi.