Fresno State professor and poet Mai Der Vang has been named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Yellow Rain,” a poetry collection integrating archival research and declassified documents.
The collection has been nearly a decade in the making, according to Vang. Most of those years were spent researching, including traveling to the National Security Archive in Washington D.C., consulting with Georgetown University’s Rebecca Katz regarding her dissertation on yellow rain and using online databases for the CIA, the U.S. Department of State and more.
“I ended up with thousands of pages of things to look through,” Vang said. “I was learning about yellow rain in the process, and I knew that something about [it] wasn’t right.”
Yellow rain refers to the mid-1970s recollections of Hmong refugees who said they saw a mysterious yellow substance fall from planes during their escape from Laos, which led to allegations that a chemical biological weapon had been used in breach of international treaties. The allegations have been widely debated and largely discredited.
Vang’s collection “reopens a wrongdoing that deserves a new reckoning,” according to Vang’s publisher Graywolf Press.
“I wanted to find ways to resurrect the story and all of the headlines that were swirling at that time around yellow rain. I wanted to recreate that in the book, to really show the severity of what happened,” Vang said.
According to a Fresno State News press release, Vang is the first Hmong American woman to be recognized in the Pulitzer’s arts and letter prizes’ 106-year history. She said she hopes this acclaim shows that “our story matters.”
“[This is] a chance for us to continue to tell our story from our perspective, and to create a space for those stories to be remembered and not lost,” she said.
Vang, who is now completing her third year of teaching at Fresno State, was born and raised in Fresno. Though she left the city for her education, she returned when a position at Fresno State opened, considering it a chance to come back and teach in the community she grew up in.
She called the response to her success within the community “celebratory all around,” but it isn’t the first time she’s been acknowledged by the campus.
In early May, Vang was recognized with a Provost’s Award for Promising New Faculty for assistant professors who have distinguished themselves in areas of teaching, research and service. Last year she won a Provost’s Award for Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times after being nominated by her students.
Vang plans to write another poetry collection in the future, but in the meantime wants to continue to nurture student poets at Fresno State.
“If [students are] interested in telling their stories, think about poetry as an avenue from which to do that. We have many classes in the department that offer that experience, or [students can] reach out to me if they have questions on poetry,” she said.
