Acknowledgments
I owe this book, and everything else, to my parents. Mommy and Daddy, I tried as hard as I could to preserve a small piece of your wisdom, love, strength, humor, and light, but I know I can’t tell your stories the way you do. No one can.
Buds and AKT, I will forever be your loyal disciple. Thank you for raising me by hand and by foot and for always protecting me. I know these stories are yours too.
To my grandparents, great-grandparents, great-aunts and uncles, my brother, all ancestors, thank you for meeting me across the abyss of time, place, and death. Thank you for letting me imagine you.
Thank you to my saya sayama at the University of Denver, who helped me conceive and nurture this project. Eleni Sikelianos, thank you for letting a prose writer into your documentary poetics class and for helping me to see the body as archive. Laird Hunt, thank you for giving me the courage to try my hand at writing “nonfiction” (whatever that means). Selah Saterstrom, thank you for your deep care and insight, and for reminding me to ask the text what it wants and needs. And Brian Kiteley, thank you for your kindness, generosity, and unflagging confidence in me and in this book. I would also like to thank Rachel Feder and Frederique Chevillot, for being fantastic readers of an earlier draft of this project.
I am grateful, also, to the extraordinary writing community in Denver, Colorado, where this book was largely written, especially to my magical cohort: Natalie Rogers, my Gemini sister, Mark Mayer, McCormick Templeman, Rowland Saifi, Vincent Carafano, Mona Awad, and Dennis James Sweeney. I miss you all and feel proud to be a part of such a talented and humble pack. Special thanks also to my former roommate Jana and to all my students at the University of Denver and Lighthouse Writers Workshop, especially my memoir and narrative nonfiction students.
Thank you to all the people who helped me make the memories that compose this book: my childhood friends from home, Bryan, Jess, Mel, and Carol; the lifelong friends I made in college, Heidi, Cecilia, Wendy, Allison, Eric, Jon, Walker, Scott, Caroline, and Isaac; my adoptive family and friends in Madrid, Laura, Nico, Ale, Marcelo, Gillian, Nazanin, Sam; and my cohort at Notre Dame, Dev, Sarah, Garret, Jace, and Jessie.
Parts of this book were written at Surel’s Place and Millay Colony, and I also owe thanks to Mari Christmas, Jodi Eichelberger, Sandy Shaw, Calliope Nicholas, and to my wonderful fellow residents at Millay Colony.
I am also grateful to the writing community in Amherst, Massachusetts, where this book was finished, and to my colleagues at Amherst College, especially Judy and Anna.
Thank you to all the Asian American and diasporic Asian writers who came before me and created the space for this work. I am especially grateful for Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, Thant Myint-U’s The River of Lost Footsteps, Pascal Khoo Thwe’s From the Land of Green Ghosts, Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats, and Kao Kalia Yang’s The Latehomecomer.
Thank you also to my agent, Jin Auh, for looking out for me.
Most of all, thank you to Steve Woodward, Ethan Nosowsky, Fiona McCrae, Marisa Atkinson, Katie Dublinski, and the whole staff at Graywolf Press. Steve, you were my tireless champion through this entire process and I would have never finished this book without your help and your trust. Thank you for an opportunity of a lifetime.
And lastly, I could not have written this book without your love, patience, and support, Deno. You are my one.
THIRII MYO KYAW MYINT is the author of the novel The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven (Noemi Press, 2018), which won an Asian/Pacific American Librarians Award for Literature. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere, and her work has been anthologized in Best Small Fictions and Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction. She is a former Fulbright recipient and holds a BA in literary arts from Brown University, an MFA in prose from the University of Notre Dame, and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Denver. She currently lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and teaches at Amherst College.
The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
Names for Light: A Family History by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is the 2018 winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Graywolf awards this prize to a previously unpublished full-length work of outstanding literary nonfiction by a writer who is not yet established in the genre. Previous winners include The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang, Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere but Here by Angela Palm, Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Margaret Lazarus Dean, The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness by Kevin Young, Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays by Eula Biss, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI’s Secret from Postwar Japan by Terese Svoboda, Neck Deep and Other Predicaments by Ander Monson, and Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir by Kate Braverman.
The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize seeks to acknowledge—and honor—the great traditions of literary nonfiction. Whether grounded in observation, autobiography, or research, much of the most beautiful, daring, and original writing over the past few decades can be categorized as nonfiction.
The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is funded in part by endowed gifts from the Arsham Ohanessian Charitable Remainder Unitrust and the Ruth Easton Fund of the Edelstein Family Foundation.
Arsham Ohanessian, an Armenian born in Iraq who came to the United States in 1952, was an avid reader and a tireless advocate for human rights and peace. He strongly believed in the power of literature and education to make a positive impact on humanity.
Ruth Easton, born in North Branch, Minnesota, was a Broadway actress in the 1920s and 1930s. The Ruth Easton Fund of the Edelstein Family Foundation is pleased to support the work of emerging artists and writers in her honor.
Graywolf Press is grateful to Arsham Ohanessian and Ruth Easton for their generous support.
The text of Names for Light is set in Adobe Caslon Pro.
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