[ nei · sai · sooree · no ]
Biography
Nay Saysourinho is a writer and visual artist. She was previously a Fellow at Baldwin for the Arts, a Scholar at Tin House Workshop and a Rona Jaffe Fellow at MacDowell. In 2019, she was chosen as the inaugural Adina Talve-Goodman Fellow by One Story and in the same year as a Marion Deeds Scholar by the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. She holds a Berkeley Fellowship from Yale, a Fiction Fellowship from Kundiman and has been a prize-winner at the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards.
Remixing the traditions of her Lao heritage, her practice examines the transmission of alternate historical narratives. Her chapbook The Capture of Krao Farini was released in September 2023 by Ugly Duckling Presse.
She is currently at work on her first novel. Originally from Montréal, Nay Saysourinho now resides in New England with her husband.
*Nay Saysourinho is not on social media.
publication
excerpts
“(…) even now, when faced with the despotism of good taste, she wanted to run a scalpel along the middle of their outerwear as if she were splitting a ribcage open. Let it all fall out, see where the pink of their limbs landed, see how the pale of their skin turned blue.”
“Here opium blooms at night, vaporous arms lulling villagers to sleep like a dutiful mother. Here poppies grow in the morning and unfurl before noon. This field is the last poppy field in the Triangle.”
“You will know the apocalypse is near not when the ocean catches on fire or when birds fall from the sky, but when the middle class starts accessorizing for it.”
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“I have never known war but war knows me. It lives in the eyes of my mother when she glances at me from across the room demanding that I be quiet. Every parent teaches their children to sit still, but my mother did it with such urgency that I grew up believing that danger awaited us at every turn.”
