Thursday, February 10, 2022 - 5 p.m.
Hamilton Smith Hall
Phuc Tran has been a high school Latin teacher for more than twenty years while also simultaneously establishing himself as a highly sought-after tattooer in the Northeast. Tran graduated Bard College in 1995 with a BA in Classics and received the Callanan Classics Prize. He taught Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit in New York at the Collegiate School and was an instructor at Brooklyn College’s Summer Latin Institute. Most recently, he taught Latin, Greek, and German at the Waynflete School in Portland, Maine. His 2012 TEDx talk “Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive” was featured on NPR’s Ted Radio Hour. His acclaimed memoir, SIGH, GONE: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and The Fight To Fit In, received the 2020 New England Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. He tattoos and lives with his family in Portland, Maine.
https://www.phucskywalker.com/
"In Sigh, Gone, Phuc Tran offers a searing, trenchant, and hilarious chronicle of adolescence. His memoir seethes with all the shame and rage, loneliness and longing borne from cultural dislocation; thrums with all the fears and half-truths, anti-triumphs, and confused desires of that vicious and necessary American journey we call 'assimilation'. With this book, Tran not only puts himself on the literary map: he rips the map to pieces and tapes it back together as he—forever the bookish young punk—sees fit. The result: a refugee story of the most modern kind, told entirely on the author's own terms."
—Jaed Coffin, Author Of Roughhouse Friday
"Sigh, Gone is a memoir reminiscent of Peter Orner and Michael Patrick MacDonald, a journey of self-discovery, humanizing experiences, and connections made through the punk rock counter culture and the thrills of being a life long reader. This is a powerfully entertaining and inspirational delight."
