Biography

E.M. Tran is a Vietnamese American writer from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her stories, essays, and reviews can be found in such places as Joyland magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Thrillist, and Harvard Review Online. Her essay for Prairie Schooner won their Summer Nonfiction Prize, a Glenna Luschei Award, and was listed as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2018. She completed her MFA at the University of Mississippi and a PhD in creative writing at Ohio University.

Schedule

11:00 am to Noon
House Committee Room 3
Emerging Women Authors from the South
with Monica Brashears, Quinn Connor, Terah Shelton Harris, E.M. Tran, and moderator Karen O'Connell

12:15 pm to 1:00 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

Daughters of the New Year: A Novel 

"A daring debut." – New York Times Book Review

A MARIE CLAIRE BOOK CLUB PICK

A Recommended Read from: Salon * Good Morning America * People Magazine * Electric Lit * Goodreads * Buzzfeed * The Seattle Times * Deep South Magazine * Book Culture * Debutiful

A lively, spellbinding tale about the extraordinary women within a Vietnamese immigrant family—and the ancient zodiac legend that binds them together

What does the future hold for those born in the years of the Dragon, Tiger, and Goat?

In present day New Orleans, Xuan Trung, former beauty queen turned refugee after the Fall of Saigon, is obsessed with divining her daughters' fates through their Vietnamese zodiac signs. But Trac, Nhi and Trieu diverge completely from their immigrant parents' expectations. Successful lawyer Trac hides her sexuality from her family; Nhi competes as the only woman of color on a Bachelor-esque reality TV show; and Trieu, a budding writer, is determined to learn more about her familial and cultural past.

As the three sisters begin to encounter strange glimpses of long-buried secrets from the ancestors they never knew, the story of the Trung women unfurls to reveal the dramatic events that brought them to America. Moving backwards in time, E.M. Tran takes us into the high school classrooms of New Orleans, to Saigon beauty pageants, to twentieth century rubber plantations, traversing a century as the Trungs are both estranged and united by the ghosts of their tumultuous history.

A “haunted story of resilience and survival” (Meng Jin, Little Gods), Daughters of the New Year is an addictive, high-wire act of storytelling that illuminates an entire lineage of extraordinary women fighting to reclaim the power they’ve been stripped of for centuries.