Times did a story on . She also led The know Youth Media program , helping young people tell their stories .
Her decision not to immediately attend graduate school after Berkeley was a good one . For the first time in her life , she was learning about her culture and the hardships her parents and grandparents endured during the war , refugee camps and immigrating to America . Growing up , she did not know much about the war her family had gone through in Laos : “ You ’ re living it , not learning it .”
Returning to her family in Fresno as a young adult “ gave me a sense of grounding that I might not have gotten had I gone to graduate school right away ,” Vang said .
Back in Fresno , she learned she wanted to combine her passions : literature and her community . With a better idea of what she wanted to write about , Vang left Fresno again for the Master of Fine Arts program at Columbia University in New York . After graduating in 2014 with a degree in poetry , she returned to Fresno and taught English at Clovis Community College , worked as a graphic design consultant and completed her first book of poetry , “ Afterland .”
She graduated in four years from Berkeley , in 2003 , with a degree in English and returned to Fresno with no clear plan on a career , although she knew she wanted to write poetry .
She took a job organizing community arts and cultural events and helped coordinate a Hmong women ’ s group through the non-profit Stone Soup organization . She also joined a writing collective with other Hmong writers , and they published an anthology , which the New York
46 ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT : MAI DER VANG
“ Afterland ,” published in 2017 , centers on the “ secret war ” in Laos and the Hmong refugee experience . It won the American Academy of Poets ’ Walt Whitman Award for emerging poets , as well as other honors .
She then focused on the poems that would become “ Yellow Rain .” Her research for this collection began when she was an undergraduate at UC Berkley and she first read about the “ yellow rain ” international chemical warfare controversy . Hmong refugees reported that while fleeing Laos in the mid-1970s ,