The Fox Cities Book Festival was delighted to promote The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir as our 2020 Fox Cities Reads with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. When COVID-19 spread, it was a difficult, but clear, decision to postpone Kao Kalia Yang’s spring visit to the Fox Cities.

We are delighted to finally host this gifted writer as part of the Book Festival.

Kao Kalia Yang’s Writing

The Latehomecomer is the first Hmong-American memoir to be nationally distributed.

Kao Kalia Yang was born in a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand and her family moved to Minnesota when she was six-years-old. As a young reader, Yang remembers asking her librarian for books about people like her. When she discovered there were no books about Hmong kids, Yang also discovered her passion and purpose behind writing.

Lauded as a love letter to her grandmother, Yang recounts her extended family’s journey from war-torn jungles to the difficulties of navigating life in America, all while held together by the matriarch.

Yang is also the author of The Song Poet, winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award in Creative Nonfiction Memoir, and A Map Into the World, an American Library Associate Notable Book of the Year. Yang also co-edited the collection What God is Honored Here?: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss By and For Indigenous Women and Women of Color. Yang’s newest book, The Shared Room, released this spring and she has two more books soon on the way.

2020 Events

The 2020 Fox Cities Book Festival will open up with a presentation by Kao Kalia Yang on Sunday, October 11, 2020 at 6 PM. This event will also be streamed to our Facebook page.

Yang will give an additional talk on Monday, October 12 at 1:30 PM.

You can purchase Yang’s books via our affiliate partner Bookshop.com which supports FCBF and independent bookstores.