Phuong T. Vuong is a writer, scholar, educator, and sometimes visual artist. She is interested in speaking to and calling out the silences in the Vietnamese American and Asian American experience. She longs to celebrate and cultivate power as much as shed light on dark secrets. If tradition teaches us to never overturn graves, Phuong believes artists can dig into darkness and find much-needed truths, becoming familiar with our ghosts. She is equally interested in what it means to obscure and occlude such truths. Her writing includes but is not limited to exploring love, sex, war, trauma, and race. As a 1.5 generation immigrant and refugee, born in Viet Nam and raised in Oakland, California, Phuong writes about diaspora—experiences in Asia and the U.S. She examines how to hold multiple identities without being torn asunder. By weaving language and slips in time and meaning, she interrogates the ways language fails and supports us. She hopes to complicate ideas of fixed culture and identity and to question the underlying norms of the English language and Western thought. By sharing truths and lies, she strives to interrogate oppressive systems’ links to knowledge production.

Phuong has been awarded writing fellowships from Tin House Summer Workshop, VONA/Voices, and Kearny Street Workshop's Interdisciplinary Writers Lab. She has publications in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, The Asian American Writers' Workshop: The Margins, and elsewhere. Her reviews and interviews have been published in journals such as The Rumpus and The Adroit Journal. Phuong’s debut poetry collection, The House I Inherit, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019. Her second collection, A Plucked Zither, was released in 2023 by Red Hen Press after winning the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award 2021. She is also the author of growing persimmons, a chapbook. Today, she writes and collaborates with the She Who Has No Masters collective.

A graduate of Amherst College, Phuong earned an MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she taught undergraduate creative writing and served as an editor for TIMBER: A Journal of New Writing. She is currently a PhD candidate in Literature with a critical gender studies specialization at the University of California, San Diego, where she researches Asian/American queer and feminist writers and artists' work with the archives, creative refusal of recognition, and relations to land and water. She has been supported by the James K. Binder Fellowship and Literature Department Fellowships. She comes to the university with a background in secondary education and community organizing and has worked with Viet Unity and Asian Solidarity Collective. She is probably drinking a cup of earl grey tea right now.