Resources

The Language of Home

In this intimate talk, Yia explores how food carries the stories of who we are. A mother’s cooking can hold an entire history of migration, resilience, and love. Through story and reflection, she invites us to see food as its own language, one spoken through care, memory, and the quiet gestures that connect generations.

Why One of Stockton’s Biggest Food Cultures Still Flies Under the Radar

By Gabrielle Myers
Comstock Magazine April 2026

Stockton's 6,000-member Hmong community maintains a distinctive mountain cuisine through farmers markets and home cooking, but it remains invisible to the broader public.

Writing Between Worlds

Explore how language, story, and identity intersect in the act of writing. Drawing from her memoir, Yia reflects on what it means to write from a native lens within the English language — how culture, rhythm, and memory live inside words that English alone can’t fully contain.

Stockton author Yia Vang holds reading from memoir in Dawn Mabalon forums

By Zackary Kirk-Newton
The Collegian / Nov 7, 2025

Vang discussed overcoming her intimidation with English as a second language to become a writer, and encouraged ESL writers to embrace their native heritage as their powerful story, with English as the vehicle to share it.

Logo with the words 'soulmaker PRESS' in black text, with a faded geometric symbol in the background.

Yia Vang is Published by Soulmaker Press

Soulmaker Press is an independent publisher whose books span the fields of feminine spirituality, liberation, social justice, women’s power, flow consciousness, and more. The house publishes traditional and eBooks, pamphlets and chapbooks, podcasts and audiobooks, as well as a newspaper and other occasional material.