
Hieu Gray (Director)
Hieu Gray is a poet and filmmaker from California. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from NYU’s inaugural low-residency program with workshops in Paris and a BA in Journalism/Creative Writing from Emory University. She has been a recipient of a national poetry fellowship from the Norman Mailer Center and has been a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Gray’s work has been performed on stage for Emotive Fruition – a performance series bringing poets and actors together. She was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2016 and her poem “Ghost Song” was published in its literary anthology. Her digital video poems series “The Moving Words Project” includes a modern retelling of Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” which premiered at the International Video Poem Film Festival in Athens, Greece. For over a decade, Gray was an award-winning senior producer at CNN.

Sokunthary Svay (Poet)
Sokunthary was born in a refugee camp in Thailand shortly after her parents fled Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. They were sponsored to come to the United States and resettled in the Bronx where she grew up. She is currently poetry editor for Newtown Literary, the only literary journal for the borough of Queens, a founding member and Board President of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association (CALAA), a lecturer at the City College of New York (CUNY) in Harlem, and a recipient of the American Opera Projects' Composer and the Voice Fellowship for 2017-19 and the Poets House Emerging Poets Fellowship for 2018. Her publication credits include Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place and Time, FLESH, Prairie Schooner, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Perigee, and The Margins. Her first collection of poetry, Apsara in New York, is available from Willow Books.

