Join Kao Kalia Yang for the launch of her newest picture book, Momma’s Christmas Gift, on October 6, 2026 at 6PM at Red Balloon Bookshop. It is free but RSVP required: https://
Join Kao Kalia Yang at the O’Shaughnessy in a presentation on Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir on October 29, 2026 at 6:30. Tickets are available here: https://www.stkate.edu/
To arrange a speaking engagement, contact:
Authors Unbound – Christie Hinrichs
View my speaking profile here
Stay up to date with upcoming events or special announcements. Sign up for my personal newsletter.
Login to your account
Thaum Hluas Txog Hnub Laus: When the Days of Youth are Gone (Bee Yang, 2014)
This is an album of Hmong song poetry, kwv txhiaj hmoob, composed and sung by Bee Yang, Kao Kalia Yang’s father. The album notes and English translation of one of the songs are by Kao Kalia Yang.
Kwv txhiaj is, in the words of Ralph Ellison on the American Blues, “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-cosmic lyricism. As a form, the blues [and kwv txhiaj] is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”
NOTE: The duration of the songs do not reflect the actual song length. Please consider ordering the CD for the full songs. Thank you.
*This CD is available for purchase for $15. Click below to order:
