lawrence-minh bùi davis
lawrence-minh bùi davis, PhD is a refugee diaspore, curator, editor, writer, and troublemaker who lives as a guest on the ancestral lands of the Piscataway Nation.
[feel free to use the short bio above for readings, pubs, eulogies, or arraignments.]
A co-founder of the arts anti-profit AALR (2009), the Asian American Literature Festival (2017), the Center for Refugee Poetics (2018), and the AALF Collective (2023), he believes in stewardship of literature as social and ethical ecosystem and rethinking collective responsibility for what we write and read, and why.
In 2017 he guest-edited the first-ever issue of Poetry magazine devoted to Asian American poets. In 2019 he was honored with the Early Career Achievement in Asian American Studies Award by the Association for Asian American Studies. In 2022 he was a Kundiman Gala Honoree. As far as anyone knows, he was the first curator of viet descent at the World’s Largest Museum and Research Complex, as well as the first to be exiled from it, in summer 2025. (Two years prior he was recognized by peers as one of the Institution’s “40 Future Thinkers,” an honor later rescinded by upper leadership in the upheaval culminating in his exile; read a copy of his self-profile-that-never-was here.)
Currently lmbd is finishing work on his debut novel, GHOST ƠI.
Sometimes you can see new things by the light of his ADHD.
lmbd was born on the traditional lands of the native Timucua and Potano peoples, sometimes also called Gainesville, FL.
His childhood was shaped by a whirlwind of arrivals of refugee cousins and uncles and aunties fleeing VN, sponsored by his mom, family who’d stay for weeks, months, or a few years, forever in the corners of his inner life.
One morning, when a school bus pulled up to the curb of his apartment complex, he climbed out of a dumpster to board and learned that most elementary school kids didn’t look for books or tools or toys in dumpsters, and he became a little more himself.
Sometime in his late 20s, lmbd first met his editor, but mistook him for a sibling. lmbd wasn’t entirely wrong: he was a brother, this strange Gerald Maa, and wouldn’t turn out to be lmbd’s editor for another 20 years. At first they were co-editors, founding a strange literary journal creature named AALR, The Asian American Literary Review.
If there is a signature moment in the life of AALR, maybe in the criss-crossed lives of GM + lmbd, it is the two showing up to an annual gala for the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association with the newly published, very first issue of AALR in hand, ready, like any good salesmen, to give away copies for free. Ideally to every Asian American-identifying, Asian Am-serving librarian in the banquet hall. What happened next is a fuzzy spot in history, but multiple witnesses report hearing something like, Please, take one! It’s free! Free! Asian American literature! and then No! No! Please leave me alone! followed by the sight of an elderly librarian running into the night, two young dreamers fools chasing after.
lmbd is shacked up with the love of his life, Mimi Khúc. The two are partners in artmaking, teaching, parenting, caregiving, and fiery retribution. Both are Scorpios, and, you know, Scorpios sharpen Scorpios.