emPOWERment

Asian American Women and Breast Cancer

This 2014 chapbook gathered poems I had written during the 10 years after my breast cancer was diagnosed. They are poems of healing humor and grief of the loss of my left breast. I have performed these poems throughout the world with one goal to encourage women, especially Southeast Asian women and women of color, to get mammograms as a baseline or to diagnose the disease as soon as possible. More than 20 years later, these lyrical messages are still relevant.