Center for the literary arts in New York State
50 YEARS ON:
Cathy Linh Che and Gerald McCarthy
4:30 p.m. Tuesday, September 9, 2025
Conversation / Q&A
University at Albany
Multi-Purpose Room, Campus Center West
1400 Washington Avenue Albany NY 12222 - See map.
Cathy Linh Che is the author of Becoming Ghost (2025), a poetry collection that documents her parents’ experiences as Vietnam War refugees who, after escaping by boat to the Philippines, were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s "Apocalypse Now," placing them at the margins of their own story.
Poetry Northwest literary journal called it "a revelation. Harrowing, lyrical, surprisingly restrained at times while also fiercely visceral, Becoming Ghost is, above all, courageous in its willingness to confront the conflicts within the author’s own family without letting the world off the hook."
The book was featured in Ms. magazine’s “Best Poetry of 2024 and 2025.” Split (2014), her first collection, won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is also the author of a children’s book, An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History (2023).
(Photo credit: Katie Bloom)
Gerald McCarthy, poet and anti-war activist, is the author of Hitchhiking Home from Danang: A Memoir of Vietnam, PTSD and Reclamation (2023). The memoir recounts his tour of duty as a Marine in Vietnam, his subsequent desertion, and his time spent in civilian jails, military brigs, and a Navy psychiatric ward.
Upon receiving a medical discharge, he worked as a stonecutter, concrete finisher, and shoe factory worker before attending the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. He retired as professor of English at St. Thomas Aquinas College. McCarthy's poetry collections include Shoe Town (1992), Trouble Light (2008), and Door in the Wall (2020). His poems also appear in several notable anthologies of war poetry.
In an interview published in Portside, Jan Barry wrote “McCarthy has dug deep into his past to produce an astounding volume of literature. Hitchhiking Home from Danang … reveals the inner world of many war veterans that home folks haven’t a clue about.”— Read more.
Cosponsored by the English Department’s Creative Writing Program and Young Writers Project, and UAlbany’s Writing & Critical Inquiry Program (WCI).
