Diana Khoi Nguyen
“Sometimes I think I know what’s going to happen in a poem because I have some awareness of what’s going on in my own mind at the moment. But when I start to work on a poem, the poem shows me otherwise—I didn’t and don’t know anything at all.”
“In Root Fractures, we come face-to-face with a dark gravitational pull, the great black hole of war. Through the Vietnamese American experience, Diana Khoi Nguyen languages a feeling many of us can relate to, so often buried, silent and deep, within land, blood, bone, into molecular DNA. Yet because a black hole, deceptively, is not empty space, Nguyen tunnels through memories, photographs, family stories, death, grief, belonging and separation, motherland and mother tongue, relocation and empire—the points of entry and departure in those holes left in her siblings, parents, grandparents, and skyward to generations before. ‘A hole is a hole, but none of them are the same,’ Nguyen writes. Yet, she reminds us, there is a way out. As they ‘illuminate what once was broken,’ each of these poems glimmers and pulses along a pathway out—not for one person alone, but as enduring starlight, for generations to come.”
“Exceptionally spare . . . A soaring tribute, a mesmerizing visual feat, and an all-around astonishing debut.”
“Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of is nothing short of an extraordinary debut...Nothing here is ever entirely complete— ghost of mourning, ghost of yearning, ghost of the kiln unfilled with the probable impossibility of an afterlife. It is as if a medieval scholar were transcribing an ancient Latin manuscript, pieces of script are missing, illegible, annulled by time. The scholar writes in the margins Desunt Non Nulla— signifying—Not No Things Are Missing, Nguyen’s voice is both wraithlike and astonishingly frontal; this is one of the most gifted first books I’ve read.”
“Lyric fills in the holes in the stories. These poems sing to and for the ghosts of identity, history and culture; they sing like a ghost who looks from the window or waits by the door. Ghost Of is unforgettable.”
Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Root Fractures (Scribner, 2024), and Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest and a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. She is also the author of the chaplet Unless (Belladonna*, 2019), which received the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Colorado Book Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in magazines and journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, & PEN America.
A Kundiman fellow, Nguyen ’s other honors include a recent 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as awards from the 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Contest, Key West Literary Seminars, and Academy of American Poets. She has held scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.
Currently, she collaborates with the Vietnamese womxn and non-binary, gender nonconforming collective, She Who Has No Master(s), and is at work on a digital humanities mapping project for the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists' Network (founded by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and Viet Thanh Nguyen).
In an interview with Four Way Review, she was asked about influence while working on Ghost Of, and if she turned to poetry, or elsewhere. She responded, “I wanted to originate out of something else, not because I was trying to be inventive but because I wanted to find something organic within this personal instance. For example, I was given the prompt in one of my classes to do some kind of radical eulogy. It gave me a different way to construct around thinking about my brother… which I hadn’t been doing much with at that moment, creatively. I think I was afraid of mining my family trauma for the sake of art-making.”
Born and raised in California, where she earned a BA in English and Communication Studies from UCLA, followed by an MFA from Columbia University and a PhD from the University of Denver. In addition to teaching during her graduate studies, she has taught creative writing in academic and literary community settings such as the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, University of Washington at Bothell, Randolph College Low-Residency MFA, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Hugo House, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Naropa's Summer Writing Program, and 92Y to name a few. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.
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(c) Karen Lue
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