Isabelle Thuy Pelaud

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is a professor at SF State University interested in the role of race and war in shaping identity and cultural productions. She wrote the very first book on Vietnamese American literature titled "This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature" and co-edited the award winning book "Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora". After growing up in France, she moved to the United States where she earned her doctorate from UC Berkeley and spent her career identifying the unique barriers facing Vietnamese American writers prior and after writing a book. Her academic work has been featured in The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, Themes in Contemporary North American Fiction, Journal of Asian American Studies, The Asian American Literary Review, Amerasia Journal, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is now working on her creative writing.

As an Ethnic Studies Scholar, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud devoted her life to rectifying the systemic and cultural barriers she identified in her scholarships. To this aim, she co-founded with Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen a non-profit organization called the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). For almost two decades Pelaud and Nguyen created, through this organization, opportunities for diasporic Vietnamese writers to be nurtured and empowered, and for their work to be more visible. In three years for example, they helped publish 18 books. Their last book "The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora" they co-edited with Lan Duong, is the direct result of their activist and academic works. This collection of dialogues shows with utmost clarity that their fight is absolutely needed and is highly relevant to American culture.