Poet Hoa Nguyen was born in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam and raised in the Washington, D.C., area. She is the author of several books, including A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (Wave Books, 2021), winner of the Canada Book Award and a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the National Book Award, and the Governor General’s Literary Award; Violet Energy Ingots (Wave Books, 2016); Tells of the Crackling (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015); Red Juice: Poems 1998–2008 (Wave Books, 2014); and As Long As Trees Last (Wave Books, 2012). With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a literary journal and small press.

The recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize, Nguyen has garnered attention from such outlets as PBS NewsHour, Granta, the Walrus, the New York Times, CBC Books, and Poetry magazine, among others. She was a finalist for the 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Nguyen is a member of She Who Has No Master(s), a program of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). In 2021, she became a founding mentor in SWHNM’s writing mentorship program designed for and led by Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diasporic women and nonbinary writers.

Nguyen is a 2022–2023 visiting practitioner at Toronto Metropolitan University and a mentor for writers as part of the graduate programs at Guelph University and the University of Toronto. Since 2015, she has taught in the Bard College MFA program in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, where she was named cochair of the discipline of writing in 2020. She has lived in Toronto, Canada, since 2011.

Related Poems

Related Authors