Children’s author to close out season series at Lenoir-Rhyne

In its 15th year, The Little Read will bring nationally recognized children’s author, Kao Kalia Yang to Lenoir-Rhyne. Concluding the season’s series of events, Yang, a Hmong-American writer born in the refugee camps of Thailand to a family that escaped the genocide of the Secret War in Laos, came to America at the age six.

She is the author of “The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir,” winner of the 2009 Minnesota Book Awards in Creative Nonfiction/Memoir and Readers’ Choice, and “The Song Poet,” winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award in Creative Nonfiction Memoir.

This fall, Yang debuted her first children’s book, “A Map Into the World,” which is also the first literary published children’s book by a Hmong-American writer centered on a Hmong-American family. It is the story of a young Hmong girl’s discovery of the changing seasons of a year and the different seasons of a life. This distinctive story weaves together threads of family life, community and culture, the natural world and the power of stories. Yang’s newest children’s book “The Shared Room” was published in the spring. This fall, she will release two more books – a collective memoir about refugee lives titled “Somewhere in the Unknown World” and another children’s book “The Most Beautiful Thing.”