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Zach Anderson (he/him) is a CHamoru/Pinoy writer who was born on ‘Amuwu Chumash land (Lompoc, CA) and raised on Nisenan, Umatilla, and Walla Walla land (Sacramento, CA). After receiving his BA in Writing and Literature from California College of the Arts, he was a staff reporter on the Pacific Islander community for AsAmNews. He is currently a first year MA student at UCLA’s Asian American Studies program where his research focuses on the relationship between Asian Americana and Pacific Islander youth living in the diaspora. In addition to his journalism, his fiction has also been published in Susurrus and Eclectica magazine. When he’s not being a student or writing, he enjoys birdwatching and cooking with cast iron.
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Catherine Ho (she/her) grew up in Louisville, KY (Shawnee, Cherokee, and Chickasaw land). Prior to coming to UCLA’s Asian American Studies MA program, she studied Neuroscience and Ethnicity, Migration, Rights at Harvard College. She is currently interested in questions of family, refuge(e), legibility, abolition, and the possibilities and limitations of legal advocacy. Her MA thesis explores the vexxed appeals to family and kinship in Southeast Asian refugee anti-deportation advocacy. The project asks how deportation, a fundamentally state-facing procedure, forces us to consider less violent and more liberating modes of engagement with power and with each other. Catherine grew up hearing stories of her family’s resettlement from Vietnam to the United States through the Humanitarian Operation subprogram of the Orderly Departure Program. This sensibility and familial history means she appreciates that lived experience and embodied knowledge are crucial to understanding our entangled pasts and building our collective figures. She hopes to continue listening to and amplifying historically marginalized voices in her future legal advocacy. Catherine also loves hiking, kayaking, baking, and watching Vietnamese standup comedy!
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Megan Vu (she/her) is an Orange County native and current 4th year student at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is expected to graduate with a major in Human Biology and Society and a minor in Asian American Studies. In her college career, Megan has spent years volunteering as a Logistics Chair for the Mobile Clinic Project at UCLA—a collaborative organization with the David Geffen School of Medicine that provides health and social services to unhoused populations in West Hollywood. Megan’s interest in this project stems from an eagerness to learn more about the historical artifacts that emphasize Guam’s participation and oral histories during the Vietnam War. Being a daughter of first-generation Vietnamese refugees who left during the Fall of Saigon and fled to Indonesia for the refugee camps, she especially would like to see how these events impacted other families and how it intersects with her own personal relationships. Megan hopes to apply to medical school to pursue medicine in the desire to make healthcare more accessible for low-income Asian American and Pacific Islander communities—specifically with a better understanding using this project through advocacy and service.
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