Author Thao Ha's Book Talk: Love Letters to the Dirty South

Join us for a book talk with author and sociologist Thảo Hà celebrating her stunning debut memoir, Love Letters to the Dirty South. Through a deeply personal story of reckless youth, enduring love, and heartbreaking loss, Hà explores the Vietnamese refugee experience in the American South, family life in the diaspora, mass incarceration, and prison injustice.

The evening will feature an author talk, audience Q&A, and book signing.

Love Letters to the Dirty South is a memoir about what it means to love, long for, and lose someone incarcerated. A testament to lifelong love, it is also an unflinching depiction of prison culture, a loving portrait of family life in the Vietnamese diaspora community, and a counternarrative to the typical immigrant’s story. As a Vietnamese refugee and sociologist, Thao Ha deftly explores refugee trauma, mass incarceration, and prison injustice, and she shows how unconditional love attempts to navigate, resist, and thwart a dehumanizing system. In this stunning debut, she tells her story of reckless youth, love reclaimed and tragically lost, and the power of words to transcend boundaries with unflinching honesty, insight, and conviction.