Author Visit: Vu Tran

Part of the Chippewa Valley Book Festival. Author Vu Tran reading from his book Dragonfish. Dragonfish began as a short story, a work of noir (dark, fatalistic, cynical) crime fiction that takes place in present-day Las Vegas. As that short story expanded into its novel form, the story stretched into the past, into the refugee camps of Pulau, and the waters between Vietnam and Malaysia so that all the noir and crime elements became a framework for a narrative of migration and immigration. Born in Saigon in 1975, Vu Tran fled Vietnam with his family, spent time in a refugee camp, then settled and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tran holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.