(Photograph: Shannon Forsman)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chuck Forsman is a painter, photographer, and Professor of Art Emeritus at the University of Colorado. He has had more than fifty one-person shows, half of which were in museums and art centers, and his work is included in more than twenty public collections, including the Denver Art Museum, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Phoenix Art Museum, and Princeton University Museum of Art. Forsman has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts awards and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, among other honors. His previous published books are Arrested Rivers: Paintings by Chuck Forsman (University Press of Colorado, 1994), Western Rider: Views from a Car Window (Center for American Places, 2003), Along Buddha's River: Currents of Change on the Mekong (self-published, 2011), and Walking Magpie: On and off the Leash (George F. Thompson Publishing, in association with the Denver Art Museum, 2013).

ABOUT THE ESSAYIST

Le Ly Hayslip is a writer, philanthropist, and humanitarian whose life has been documented in Oliver Stone's 1993 film, Heaven and Earth. She is the author of two path-breaking memoirs, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace (Doubleday, 1989) and Child of War, Woman of Peace (Doubleday, 1993), and the founder of two charitable organizations, the East Meets West Foundation and Global Village Foundation, which are dedicated to improving the health and welfare of the needy in Vietnam and Asia.