MVP Fridays: “POV: Writing as Other” with Viet Thanh Nguyen

Friday, Sept 19, 2025
4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Geddes Hall, Andrews Auditorium

Join us Friday afternoons on select home football weekends for MVP Fridays: lectures by national leaders, journalists, and writers on questions of meaning, values, and purpose. 

For the weekend of the Purdue game, we welcome Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Introduction by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi, Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English.

Sponsored by the Institute for Social Concerns and co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the Department of American Studies, the Initiative on Race and Resilience, and the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.