Kitchen Talk: Food Histories, Literature, and Afro-Asian Archives in the Americas

Join Asian American Alumni Association of Yale Univerisity and Kitchen Marronage in wrapping up May AANHPI Heritage Month in a virtual kitchen talk with novelist Monique Truong (YC'90) and Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe (GSAS '15). Together the two will explore Afro-Asian intimacies in the culinary archives of colonial encounter. A special recipe will be distributed to participants beforehand.

Special thanks to Afro-Asia Group Summer Intern Kendall Greene for editing this video. Thanks also to composer-in-residence of Dark Lab for producing the intro and outro music, Jesse Sgambati.

Monique Truong, '90 is a Vietnamese American novelist, essayist, and librettist. Her debut novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Fiction Book, a Chicago Tribune Favorite Fiction, a Miami Herald Top 10 Books, and winner of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Awards/Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and Bard Fiction Prize, among others. She followed with two more award-winning novels, Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010) and The Sweetest Fruits (Viking, 2019), and all together her books have been translated into fourteen languages to date. Born in Saigon, South Vietnam in 1968, Truong and her parents came to the U.S. as refugees in 1975. She grew up in North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas, and is based now in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A. from Yale University and J.D. from Columbia School of Law.

Tao Leigh Goffe, GSAS '15 is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, DJ, and professor who grew up between the UK and New York. She attended Princeton for her undergraduate degree and received her PhD from Yale University. Dr. Goffe is also the Executive Director of Afro-Asia Group, an organization that centers the intersections of African and Asian diasporas, futurity, and coalition-building. She is an assistant professor of Black studies, gender, and sexuality at Cornell University.