H’Rina DeTroy is completing a creative nonfiction manuscript that blends personal narrative with critical analysis and historical inquiry. Her essay, The Vengeance of Elephants, outlines a theme and question her larger book project seeks to answer: how we make our lives out of stories and imagination. At the heart of this story is a complex mother and daughter relationship that centers questions on race, gender, and inherited legacies of war and displacement.

H’Rina’s project also explores the significance of being a people with a history of an oral tradition instead of a written one — and how ethnographic work completed by outsiders has created a biased record of Montagnard history and identity. Her work makes use of archival materials from the French colony and America's war in Vietnam as an artistic opportunity to interrogate what can or can't be known, whose perspective matters, and who is granted authority over a people’s story. She aims to construct a reparative counter-narrative that privileges the voices and experiences of those history pushed into the margins. 

View Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Tweet about H’Rina’s work.

In 1853, a French missionary recorded that the Montagnards in Vietnam believed writing to be an act of magic. As a Montagnard American in the twenty-first century, H'Rina DeTroy also believes writing is a kind of sorcery. She was named a 2019 Emerging Writer Fellow at Aspen Word in Memoir. Roxane Gay chose her essay, The Vengeance of Elephants for the 2017 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Creative Nonfiction for december magazine. Her essay entitled Knot was published in the anthology Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland, and was presented at the 2017 Demeter Press panel in Washington D.C. Her journalism work has appeared in print and web publications Okayafrica.com, Huffington Post, DiaCritics, Cultural Survival Quarterly, the Amistad literary journal, among others. She holds a master's degree in journalism and an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College. She believes that creating space for Montagnard stories and imagination is a magical weapon against legacies of erasure.

Please visit H’Rina’s Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and her website for more information.