Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith was born in Nha Trang, Vietnam in 1968. He earned a B.A. in English from California State University, Northridge in 1993. He later earned an M.A. and M.F.A. in creative writing from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, LA in 1999. He currently resides in Ruston with his wife Robyn and their two daughters, Layla and Naomi. He has been teaching literature, composition, and creative writing at Louisiana Tech University since 1999. Because I am first generation Amerasian (half African American and half Vietnamese) to come to America, I feel it has been my duty to preserve my birthplace and birth country of Vietnam. In doing so, writing, whether fiction or poetry, is a form of recording the history of my country, the family my mother left behind for a better life in America, the war itself, its aftermath, and both our failures and accomplishments of the immigrant experience. My objective has been narrative plenitude of the Vietnamese experience as well those like myself who are biracial.