REGIS UNIVERSITY TO HOST AUTHOR UYEN NICOLE DUONG, 2009

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Acclaimed author and story teller Uyen Nicole Duong 

 (DENVER) – Award-winning author and story teller Uyen Nicole Duong will discuss her trilogy of novels on Vietnamese American immigrants (including her debut novel Daughters of the River Huong), and will conduct a book signing from noon to 3 p.m. May 6 at Regis University’s Dayton Memorial Library.   The event is free and open to the public.

In March 1975, Uyen Nicole Duong won the Republic of Vietnam’s National Honor Prize for Literature at the age of 16. By April, Duong was forced to leave Saigon to escape the fall of the city. Now, more than 35 years later, she returned to Vietnam and the land of her ancestors via her debut novel Daughters of the River Huong.  Duong’s gift for storytelling emerges once again in this powerful tale which spans four generations of Vietnamese women, from the ancient royal palaces of the Violet City of Hue to the teeming streets of wartime Saigon, from the affluence of Paris' St. Germain-des-Pres to modern Manhattan.

     Intricately laced with history from Duong’s own past, Daughters of the River Huong examines the years of conflict preceding the Vietnam War through the lives of a Vietnamese royal concubine and her descendants. Themes of family, country, loyalty and redemption intertwine the journeys of Huyen Phi, the Mystique Concubine whose ancestors traced back to the extinct Kingdom of Champa; Ginseng, the Mystique Concubine’s second daughter and a heroine of the Vietnamese Revolution; and the teenage Simone, a girl who flaunts convention and enters into a forbidden relationship of love and sensuality before becoming an exile in the United States. The result is a multi-generational saga that vividly portrays the tumultuous time and war-torn country, its villains and heroes.

            Daughters of the River Huong is the first in a novel trilogy published by AmazonEncore, which specializes in discovering exceptional yet overlooked works of fiction.  The other two novels in Duong's trilogy are Mimi and Her Mirror and Postcards from Nam.  A fourth book, recommended for use as a textbook in Vietnamese American cultural studies and literature, may also be released as early as 2011.

Vietnam-born Uyen (Wendy) Nicole Duong arrived in the United States at the age of sixteen, a political refugee from a country torn apart by war. She received a Bachelor of Science in Communication and Journalism from Southern Illinois University, a law degree from the University of Houston, and the advanced LLM degree from Harvard. She was also trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena.

She has been a journalist, public education administrator, attorney, law professor, and a self-taught painter whose work focuses on l’Art Brut. A full time law professor at the University of Denver, the author is currently on leave and resides in Houston, Texas.

For more information, contact Maureen McGuire at mmcguire@regis.edu.