Isabelle Pelaud

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is a writer, scholar, and community builder whose work bridges creative expression and social justice. She is the author of This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature and co-editor of Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora and The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora. Her current autofiction project, My Mother’s Gamble, explores the texture of survival such as the human cost of displacement, the paths toward healing, and the decolonization of the mind.

Born in France to a Vietnamese mother and French father, Pelaud writes from a transnational perspective shaped by migration and cultural in-betweenness. In 2007, she co-founded the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), a nonprofit organization that nurtures Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diasporic voices through residencies, publications, and public events. Pelaud is currently a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University where her writing and teaching focus on gender in Vietnamese American literature and the arts.