Talks

Joy as Resistance

Resilience is defiance. Loung shares the daily, deliberate practice of joy that carried her from surviving to thriving, and shows audiences how to build the same skills in their own lives. A corporate version for teams and leaders is available.
Best for: First-year experience, student wellbeing, leadership programs, company all-hands and wellness weeks.

First They Killed My Father: An Eyewitness Account

Loung’s firsthand account of surviving the Khmer Rouge years, told through the memoir read in classrooms around the world. For schools and universities teaching the book, she brings its pages to life — the history, the family behind the story, and the message that your past does not have to predetermine your future.
Best for: Schools and universities teaching the book, Common Read programs, Holocaust and genocide education, history and human rights courses.

From Memoir to Movie to Graphic Novel: The Life of a Story

One story, three lives: a bestselling memoir, a Netflix film Loung co-wrote with Angelina Jolie and shot in Cambodia, and now the graphic novel Spirits of Survival. With clips and her own photographs, Loung takes audiences behind the scenes — what changed with each form, what she fought to keep, and why owning your story matters. 2027 marks the film’s tenth anniversary.
Best for: Libraries, book festivals, film and media studies, Common Read programs.

The Power of Narratives: How Rewriting Your Story Will Change Your Life

A child who could not say what had happened to her wrote it down instead, and those pages became a bestselling memoir. Loung shows how the stories we tell about ourselves can cage us or free us — and how to move from victim to survivor, from silence to voice, from invisible to seen.
Best for: Counseling and wellness, creative writing, women’s programs, conferences.

Peace Is an Action: Why Leaders Are Made, Not Born

Peace is not a wish. It is an action, and many of them. Drawing on three decades of campaigns against landmines, violence against women and the use of child soldiers, Loung shows ordinary people where their own power lies, and how small, daily acts add up to real change.
Best for: Civic engagement, service learning, convocation, student leadership.

The Story Only a Human Can Tell

In an age of AI, what can only a human write? Grief, memory, a mother’s voice, the smell of a market in Phnom Penh. Loung makes the case that our own stories matter more now, not less, and invites audiences to claim the experiences no machine can know.
Best for: First-year experience, writing and humanities programs, libraries, AI and ethics series.

Magic & Myths: The Spirits of Survival

Cambodia is a land of spirits: ancestors who watch over the living, guardians of fields and temples, and the protectors of stories told at bedtime. Drawing on her upcoming graphic novel Spirits of Survival, Loung explores how the legends of her childhood gave a young girl courage when everything else was taken — and why myth and imagination still help us survive hard times.
Best for: Libraries, teen and young adult programs, comics and book festivals, Asian studies, AAPI Heritage Month.

Formats: keynote (45–60 minutes plus Q&A), fireside conversation, classroom visits, film screening and discussion, commencement and convocation. In person or virtual.

Why I Share My Story

As a child survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, I carried those stories inside me for years — a weight that cast a shadow around me wherever I went.

The first time I shared my story with a group of friends, something unexpected happened. They leaned in. They listened. They came up afterward and said, "I didn't know. But now I do. And now I want to do something."

That moment — that shift in a room — is why I have spent 25 years speaking.

I speak because stories are how we find each other across difference. Because the world becomes a little less divided every time one person truly hears another's truth. I speak because I believe that every person has their own story worth telling — and their own capacity to heal, to act, and to lead.