McSweeney's Presents The Make Believers

At this event Vu Tran and Thi Bui—co-editors of a special issue of McSweeney’s magazine featuring work from writers and artists in the Vietnamese diaspora—will be joined by fellow contributor Isabelle Pelaud for a reading and celebration of the issue’s publication on the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. As part of the “New Directions in Contemporary Literary Publishing” initiative organized by the Neubauer Collegium research project, the event will also include a roundtable discussion on the issue’s innovative art design, its thematic engagement with the Vietnamese diasporic experience, and the unique art residency in France that inspired the issue and brought together all the featured writers and artists.

Co-sponsored by the Neubauer Collegium, the Department of English, and the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.

Participants

Thi Bui is a writer and artist from Vietnam, California, New York, and currently New Orleans. Best known for her graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (2017), she has also been a longtime educator in public high schools, a professor of comics, and an organizer and artist-activist. She received a Caldecott Honor as the illustrator of the children’s book, A Different Pond (2017), by the poet Bao Phi.

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud was born in France and is currently a Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. She is the author of This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (2011), and the coeditor of Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora(2014) and of The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora (2025). She is also the cofounder and executive director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN).

Vu Tran was born in Saigon and raised in Oklahoma, and is currently an Associate Professor of Practice at UChicago in the Department of English and the Program in Creative Writing, where he directs undergraduate studies. A recipient of the Whiting Award and an NEA Fellowship, Tran is the author of the novel, Dragonfish (2015), and a forthcoming novel, Your Origins.

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