Dao Strom

Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of the poetry collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020), winner of the 2022 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion piece, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press, 2018); a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West (2015); and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2019, 2006) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books, 2003). Her works also include interdisciplinary music/poetry performance and visual-poetry installations. She received a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship and a 2016 Creative Capital Artist Award. Her work has received support also from the Oregon Community Foundation/Creative Heights Grant, Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC), Precipice Fund/Warhol Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, and others.

Strom is a founding member of two collaborative art projects: She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of women writers of the Vietnamese diaspora; and De-Canon, a literary + social art + publishing project highlighting books and works by writers of color.

Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches with Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing.

Artist website

TENDER REVOLUTIONS/YELLOW SONGS is a hybrid project comprised of writings, music, and visual ephemera by Dao Strom, with some components made in collaboration with others. The project’s initiating structure is a series of four chapbooks, Yellow Songs I-IV

• Yellow Songs I: Voiced-Voiceless
• Yellow Songs II: We [/] Breathe
• Yellow Songs III: Postwar Tablefruit
• Yellow Songs IV: Motherwound

These are paralleled by a series of four EP albums, Nhạc Vàng I-IV.

Tender Revolutions is an LP-length collection of songs culled from the four EPs, made available on vinyl and digital.

This project is a joint release of The 3rd Thing Press, Antiquated Future Records, and Beacon Sound.