Human Library "Books"

I’m a first-generation refugee from Vietnam. During the war, my parents fought on the South Vietnamese side as U.S. allies. My father was a helicopter pilot in the Air Force, trained at Fort Rucker, Alabama, and my mother worked with the American embassy. After the war, they chose to stay in Vietnam, hoping to help rebuild the country. But growing tensions due to their past eventually led to our family home being destroyed by the Communist government. That moment changed everything. It set my family on the path to seek asylum and begin a new life in Northwest Arkansas. My story is about how that single event shaped the course of my life—how I’ve learned to reconcile my traditional Asian upbringing with life in the American South, what it means to move beyond fitting in toward belonging, and how I continue to find my identity along the way.

1. A Family Shaped by War
2. A New Life in an Unknown Place
3. Between Two Worlds: Reconciling Identities
4. Finding My Voice through Faith and Art
5. From Fitting in to Belonging

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After betrayal, loss, and emotional collapse, I found myself forced to start over, learning how to live alone, rediscover my worth, and rebuild my life from the ground up after my ex-wife had an affair with her best friend's husband and my mom received a terminal cancer diagnosis in the same three-month period. This is a story about surviving devastation and discovering that healing is terrifyingly beautiful.

1. The Weight of the Life You Thought You Had- discussing the grief of the loss of the two most important people in my life: my mother and my wife, and how I dealt with the initial fallout
2. Getting the Wind Knocked into Me- exploring how friends and family complicated and helped my healing process
3. The Sound of Silence- the exploration of living alone for the first time in my30s, as well as assuming the role of caretaker for my mother.
4. Community and the Mirror of Recovery- how leaning into my friends helped my recovery, and how my emotional recovery and my mother's physical recovery mirrored each other
5. A Foundation Built on Stone- where I will discuss my mother's unexpected total recovery, remarriage, and support my best friend through his divorce by using my own past pain and experience.

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After betrayal, loss, and emotional collapse, I found myself forced to start over, learning how to live alone, rediscover my worth, and rebuild my life from the ground up after my ex-wife had an affair with her best friend's husband and my mom received a terminal cancer diagnosis in the same three-month period. This is a story about surviving devastation and discovering that healing is terrifyingly beautiful.

1. The Weight of the Life You Thought You Had- discussing the grief of the loss of the two most important people in my life: my mother and my wife, and how I dealt with the initial fallout
2. Getting the Wind Knocked into Me- exploring how friends and family complicated and helped my healing process
3. The Sound of Silence- the exploration of living alone for the first time in my30s, as well as assuming the role of caretaker for my mother.
4. Community and the Mirror of Recovery- how leaning into my friends helped my recovery, and how my emotional recovery and my mother's physical recovery mirrored each other
5. A Foundation Built on Stone- where I will discuss my mother's unexpected total recovery, remarriage, and support my best friend through his divorce by using my own past pain and experience.

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I am currently homeless, and every day I face judgment from people who don’t know my story, along with constant safety concerns that make it hard to rest or feel secure. I became homeless after a series of setbacks that I couldn’t recover from, and that’s why I’m in this situation now. Despite everything, I still hold hope for a future where I can rebuild my life, find stability, and feel safe again.

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Addiction nearly stole my life, my family, and my faith. But what felt like the end became my beginning. Through recovery, faith, and years of rebuilding, I’ve turned my pain into purpose. I now lead others through recovery and advocacy work, proof that no matter how far you fall, there’s always a way back and a way forward.

1. Born in the Storm
2. Becoming What I Feared
3. A Voice in the Darkness
4. From Rubble to Renewal
5. Beauty from Ashes

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Emerging from a fractured family system and being raised by a resilient single mother, One Thousand Invisible Deaths held onto hope for her future. She imagined that becoming a wife and mother would absorb the ache of her past. However, adulthood unfolded differently—marked by infertility, early menopause, a career change, and a spouse’s battle with severe mental illness and addiction that lead to incarceration. One Thousand Invisible Deaths is the story of learning to live through what cannot be seen—grieving the invisible, rebuilding after the unimaginable, and ultimately discovering that a meaningful life can still grow from loss.

1. Growing Is Hard to Do
2. A Hoped for Future
3. A Grief No One Sees
4. A Living Loss
5. The Unexpected Life

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Read about the story of a biracial young lady who grew up in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She was raised by her white mother, but walked with a different set of rules that society had bestowed on her than her mother. This story examines the life of an individual who has grown up in a mixed-up state, not being able to identify as black or white, but somewhere in between. Her journey has left her with a perspective that is able to break down racial barriers and represent what life can look like when you truly live all mixed up!

1. How Mixed Up Got Mixed Up
2. Noticing the Difference
3. Walking Billboard
4. Speaking a Unique Language
5. Bridging Differences

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Breaking Borders aims to share an account of her childhood in the Philippines and life as an immigrant in the United States. She will share experiences of childhood domestic violence and the grip of toxic matriarchy, all of which have shaped her messy but enriched life as a mom, preacher's wife, and woman of color. This book aspires to break down mental health stigmas, prejudices, and generalizations of hate that can divide our community.

1. Lost childhood
2. Teenage struggles
3. Navigating life in the United States
4. The unlikely preacher's wife
5. The path to a new calling

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This is the story of when I decided to cancel the revocation of my parental rights for my newborn daughter who was in the process of being adopted. Five days after she was born, I exercised my right to change my mind and get her back. What was a devastating time and an incredibly hard decision to make, turned into a beautiful story of family being formed of people that you choose! We ended up moving to Fayetteville to live with her would-have-been adoptive parents when she was 3 months old, and have been here ever since.
1. Choosing Adoption
2. Choosing Adoptive Parents
3. Birth Day
4. Knowing Your Rights
5. Choosing Parenthood Over Adoption

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A is for Adam, Z is for Zealot deconstructed from Christian Nationalism. She grew up in a fundamentalist household with a cult-like church and school. Her life got turned upside down when she was kicked out and had to go to public school. She broke free from undiagnosed selective mutism and learned about different viewpoints. Swinging to both extremes, from Nondenominational Communist to Traditional Catholic Theocratic Monarchist, she fully deconstructed four years ago.

1. Apocalyptic First Concept
2. Silence and Screams Brave New World
3. The Savage Tug of War What Love Feels Like
4. How to Listen and Be Listened To When You First Learn to Speak as an Adult
5. First Steps Into the Sun
6. Cold Feet and Melancholic Peace

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The Sound of Becoming is a lyrical, reflective memoir that traces how a life can be shaped, note by note, through migration, motherhood, artmaking, and community. It explores how identity forms in motion, how growth happens in tension, and how belonging is forged through sound, not only through music, but through attention, listening, and the courage to respond.
It Is the story of a woman becoming man things at once: artist, mother, immigrant, advocate, administrator, daughter, teacher. It is also a meditation on the unseen architectures that hold a life together: care, creativity, lineage, and the powerful fusion of memory and imagination. Each chapter is a window and a mirror, opening outward into the world while reflecting the inner landscape that shapes every choice, every note, every act of leadership and love.
1. Under the Skin of Sounds
2. Mirrors We Find
3. Windows We Open
4. The Architecture of Care
5. The Sound of Becoming

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Throughout my life, I’ve been given many labels — immigrant, survivor, teen mom, single mom, and special needs parent. But none of these titles truly define who I am. Behind each one is a story of love, hope, and resilience. I’ve faced challenges that could have broken me, but instead they shaped me. From surviving domestic violence and rebuilding from nothing, to learning how to advocate for my children with disabilities, every chapter of my life has taught me that strength comes from perseverance and self-discovery. My story is proof that we are more than the labels we’re given — we are the stories we write beyond them.

1. A Better Future
2. Breaking the Cycle
3. A Teen Mom’s Promise
4. When Love Becomes Advocacy
5. Beyond Labels

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This memoir reveals a journey from pain to purpose. I am a survivor at heart. I have survived child abuse. I have survived infertility issues. I have survived cancer. But life is about more than just surviving the trials; it is about overcoming pain to find the hope that life offers. My journey to overcoming was tied to my faith, which allowed me to face my trauma, learn to trust, believe in miracles, find peace, and get to forgiveness. My purpose is to help break the cycles of silence, shame and hurt for other survivors working to overcome.

1. Brokenness to Belief
2. Faith Through the Fire
3. Generational Healing

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A story of someone with ADHD who just did what they found interesting. While the world encouraged him to "pick something", he continued to be curious and listen to himself. What unfolded is something he could not have even scripted himself.

1. Your Child Needs to Learn to Sit Still
2. It's Time to Start Thinking about Your Future
3. Isn't it Time to Pick Something?
4. You’re 90 Years Old - What Do You Want to be When You Grow Up?
5. Death is the Greatest Adventure of All

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Growing up on the Navajo reservation with her family and siblings until the age of 11, Walking Two Moons was always so certain she was a true Diné woman - until she returned home, and her relatives called her an "apple." Red on the outside, white on the inside. While also navigating the rest of the United States, Alaynna's story opens the discussion of walking two moons on the same world. As an American and as Diné woman.

1. Littlefeather
2. Debe’nsta
3. Valley of the Sun
4. Changing Woman

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