Chath Piersath, born in Kop Nymit, Svay Sisophon District, in Battambang Province, is a noted Cambodian American poet, painter and humanitarian.
[1] Chath pierSath crossed the Thai-Cambodian border in 1979 at the end of the Khmer Rouge period with members of his family to Aranyaprathet Refugee Camp.
[2] Much of his poetry deals with his macabre memories of the Khmer Rouge atrocities and the massacres of the Killing Fields; his poem "A Letter to My Mother" was published by the Yale University Press in 1997.
He returned to Cambodia in 1994 for the first time after ten years of separation from family members and his homeland to do humanitarian work as a volunteer of the Cambodian American National Development Organization (CANDO).
One of his exhibitions at the Java Cafe in Phnom Penh and also in Bangkok, Thailand and Kunming, China addressed those living with HIV and AIDS.