Chath Piersath, a Lowell resident, crossed the Thai-Cambodian border in 1979 with members of his family on the way to Aranyaprathet Refugee Camp. With the help of his brother and aunt, he and his sister came to America in 1981, and lived first in Boulder, Colorado. He is a graduate of the World College West in California, with a degree in international service and development. He has worked in Cambodia as a volunteer for the Cambodian American National Development Organization. His poem "A Letter to My Mother" appears in Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs of Survivors, compiled by Dith Pran and edited by Kim DePaul (Yale University Press, 1997). The following poems have been published in the Flowering City Bridge Review Merrimack Valley Culture.