Join author and poet Nam Le as he discusses his book '36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem' with local Canberra author and Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival, Beejay Silcox. Following the discussion in the Theatre, Nam Le will be available for book signings in the Foyer. This event is presented in partnership with the Canberra Writers Festival and Red Room Poetry. '36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem', says Le, a Vietnamese refugee to Australia, is ‘the book I needed to write. The book I've been writing my whole life’. This book-length poem is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity and the violence of identity, embedded with racism, oppression and historical trauma. But it also addresses the violence in those assumptions – of being always assumed to be outside one’s home, country, culture or language. And the complex violence, for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this, of language itself. Beejay Silcox is a writer, literary critic and the Artistic Director of Canberra Writers Festival. Her book reviews and cultural commentary regularly appear in national arts publications and are increasingly finding an international audience. Beejay has stories to tell. She eloped to Las Vegas and drove to Timbuktu in a car held together with a bra strap.