Art in Dialogue: Contemporary Tibetan Women Writers on Home, Exile, and the Writing Life

with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa and Tenzin Dickie in conversation with Dominique Townsend

Join memoirist, professor and poet Tsering Wangmo Dhompa; writer, editor and translator Tenzin Dickie; and poet, scholar and translator Dominique Townsend for an intimate evening of readings and wide-ranging conversation about Tibetan literature,memoir, poetry, art, and the writing process. Reception in the galleries to follow.

Event is offered in conjunction with the exhibition Gateway to Himalayan Art. Sponsored by the Lehigh Asian Studies Department and the Lehigh University Art Galleries.

 

Art in Dialogue is a series of interdisciplinary conversations between members of the university and the wider community - reflecting the ways in which their work is dynamically engaged with other fields of inquiry.

Panelist Bios

 

 

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the author of the poetry books My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, In the
Absent Everyday, and Rules of the House (all from Apogee Press, Berkeley) and three chapbooks
of which Revolute was published in 2021 by Albion Books. Dhompa's first non-fiction book,
Coming Home to Tibet, was published in the US by Shambhala Publications in 2016 and by
Penguin, India in 2014. She was born in India and raised in the Tibetan refugee communities in
India and Nepal. Dhompa teaches in the English Department at Villanova University.

 

 

 

Dominique Townsend is Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies at Bard College. She is the author of A
Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet’s Mindröling Monastery (Columbia University Press,
2021), Shantideva: How to Wake Up a Hero, an adaptation of the classic text for young readers (Wisdom
Publications, 2015), and a collection of poems, The Weather & Our Tempers (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2014).
Her research interests include the interplay between the religious and the secular, Tibetan Buddhist
dreams and dreaming, aesthetics, poetics, and translation theory.

 

                   

 

 

 

 

Tenzin Dickie is a writer and a translator. Her edited anthology Old Demons, New Deities:
Twenty One Short Stories from Tibet was published by OR Books in 2017. A graduate of Harvard
and Columbia, she is currently communications officer at the Buddhist Digital Resource Center
and managing editor of the Journal of Tibetan Literature. She was a Fulbright fellow and a
fellow of the American Literary Translators’ Association, as well as an editor of the Tibetan
Political Review, Apogee Journal, and the Treasury of Lives. Her poetry was most recently
anthologized in Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians published by the Indian Academy of
Letters.