Asylum for the Arts events
Principal Investigator:
- Mai-Linh Hong
Additional participating faculty member:
- Ma Vang (Co-PI)
Graduate Fellow Team Members:
- Alma Alvarado-Cabrera
- Jamie Moore
- May Kao Xiong
- May Yang
Community Partner:
- Center for Refugee Poetics
- Local Merced Artists and Writers
Project Summary:
Our project, Asylum for the Arts, is an initiative whose mission is to establish a lasting infrastructure of support for refugee and immigrant writers and artists in the Central Valley. Asylum for the Arts is an adaptive and adaptable cooperative of scholars, writers, and artists that approaches support for refugee creative work through the idiom of asylum--a state of protection for artists with vulnerabilities and barriers to writing/publishing created by forced migration. “Refugee” includes people who migrate (or whose families migrate) in search of protection. Our approach strives to be trauma-informed, culturally competent, justice-oriented, and responsive to writers’ basic needs, in addition to supporting writers’ professional and artistic development. Asylum for the Arts operates in Merced based on grant funding that highlights the art and literature in the Central Valley.
Project Outcomes:
Symposium:
- Hong, Mai-Linh, Ma Vang, Alma Alvarado-Cabrera, Jamie Moore, May Kao Xiong, and May Yang. Asylum For the Arts Community Symposium, Aug. 2021, via Zoom.
Additional Grant Funding:
- UCHRI – $20,000
- Center for the Humanities – $5,000
Other Funded Events:
- “Storytelling.” 27 Apr. 2025, Youth Hub, Merced. (funded by UCHRI)
- "A Day of Creativity, Refuge, and Community.” 5 Apr. 2025, ASIP Sensory Lab, Merced. (funded by UCHRI)
- “Lives On and Off Paper: Hmong Art and Writing in the Everytday.” 23 June 2023, Merced County Library, Merced. (funded by the Center for the Humanities at UC Merced)
- "Asylum for the Arts Faculty Retreat." May 12-15, 2023, Ahwahnee, CA. (funded by the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts at UC Merced)
