Our special guest today is Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.) is a literary activist who is concerned and involved with TAN, the Technical Advisory Network of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma or the Burmese Government in Exile, located in Rockville, Md. 

Download | Duration: 00:55:11

Ms. Kaung was born in Burma during WWII and the Japanese occupation, and left there as a child to the United Kingdom, she traveled back to Burma in 1982 and eventually settled in the United States. She was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Pennsylvania where she earned an M.A. and Ph.D. She later won awards from The Academy of American Poets and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.  She has been a Pew finalist twice for her dramatic (her play “Shaman” was praised by Edward Albee) and poetic work, and is the author of two poetry chapbooks. For the last decade she has worked for the Burmese democracy movement.  She is currently a Senior Researcher with the Vahu Development Institute of Maryland. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the “Pathologies of Tyrannies, as it related to Burma.”

We also have a special call-in guest, Ms. Maureen Aung-Thwin, from the Burma Relief Project funded by The George Soros Foundation. Ms. Aung-Thwin is the Director of the Burma Project/SE Asia Initiative for the Open Society Institution, and is on the Advisory Board of the Human Rights Watch.

photograph of Ms. Kaung taken by Linda Fay Cook at Women's National Democratic Club.