Up by his bootstraps
As a child, Tararith Kho spent many nights with his family in a cave dug into a hillside in the Samrong district of Cambodia. “We were under fire,” said Kho simply. The boy who saw death early grew up to become a poet and short story writer and now a 2011-12 Scholars at Risk fellow at Harvard. Wartime and the continuing tension of Cambodian politics still deeply inform his work. Talk with Rith, as he is called, and you will hear the mantra of a witness: “I have seen this.” The onetime international writing fellow at Brown University has a literary blog, composes poems and essays in his native Khmer, and has written a dozen stories. One of them, “Red Print,” was about war and took him a decade to finish. “I’m not a political man,” he said recently. “I’m a writer, and I write what I have seen.” Even as a newborn...