We end with a powerful Community Voices section featuring the Hmong American Writers’ Circle. HWAC board member Andre Yang’s profile of the group weaves together Hmong American history with contemporary questions about language and text, and confirms the importance of a literary legacy in sustaining the lifeblood of a community, while the three poems that follow his reflections illustrate the beautifully dynamic range of work that has grown out of the space HWAC has built.

On the very last page, you’ll find a Wordle that we created with the 300 most frequently-used words in the issue. The breadth and cacophony of its verbal “map” excites us, and seems to reflect the multimodal character of the issue itself. Jangly excavations of bodies and memory, fragmented legacies of trauma, distilled questions of otherness that become liquidly transformed over the course of generations—if this is in any way representative of Asian American literature’s “Third Wave,” then the future of Asian American poetry seems promising indeed.

Thank you, as always, for your continued enthusiasm and support. We hope you enjoy Issue 3!

Peace and Light,

Iris A. Law and Mia Ayumi Malhotra
August 2011