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Sam Nga Blum

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2025 Sam Nga Blum

Sam Nga Blum is a graphic designer and illustrator living in New Orleans, Louisiana. Blum was born in Chicago, Illinois, raised in Houston, Texas, and schooled in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, receiving a BFA from Northern Michigan University. When not drawing, Blum spends her time petting dogs, gardening, binging audiobooks, and napping.

Schedule

12:15 pm to 1:00 pm
Bienville Building, Conference Center 118
Remembering, Reimagining, Becoming: Vietnamese Identity 50 Years After the War
Acclaimed author and co-editor Thi Bui and artist Sam Nga Blum discuss the evolution of Vietnamese diaspora identity with journalist Serena Puang. Using Bui's memoir, The Best We Could Do, as a touchstone for remembering the refugee experience, they will explore how contemporary writers and artists—as seen in the experimental and wide-ranging McSweeney's 78: The Make Believers—are now actively reimagining and creating a new, eclectic cultural language for what it means to be becoming Vietnamese in the world today.

1:15 pm to 2:00 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

McSweeney's Issue 78 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern): The Make Believers

In McSweeney's 78: The Make Believers (guest edited by Thi Bui and Vu Tran), nine writers of the Vietnamese diaspora write from the eclectic hodgepodge that is their shared imagination of what it means to be "Vietnamese". The work in this issue spans highbrow to lowbrow, proper to naughty, logical to absurd, and painful to funny. This issue will be published on April 30th 2025, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Its contributors work across diasporic perspectives and multiple languages. In this completely singular, nothing-else-of-its-kind, anthology contributors write (and illustrate!) from a place of collective loss and joy.

Featuring:
Doan Bui
Thi Bui
H'Rina DeTroy
Anna Moï
Hoài Huong Nguyen
Vaan Nguyen
Isabelle Thuy Pelaud
Bao Phi
Paul Tran
Vu Tran

Ever changing, each issue of the quarterly is completely redesigned (there have been hardcovers and paperbacks, an issue with two spines, an issue with a magnetic binding, an issue that looked like a bundle of junk mail, and an issue that looked like a sweaty human head), but always brings you the very best in new literary fiction.

The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir

A national bestseller and American Book Award winner, The Best We Could Do is an intimate and poignant graphic novel portraying one family’s journey from war-torn Vietnam from debut author Thi Bui.

In what Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “a book to break your heart and heal it,” The Best We Could Do brings to life Thi Bui’s journey of understanding and provides inspiration to all of those who search for a better future while longing for a simpler past.

This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family. Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.

At the heart of Bui’s story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent—the sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home.

National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Finalist
ABA Indies Introduce Winter
ALA Notable Books Selection