About
Phuong T. Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet and writer from Oakland, CA and author of A Plucked Zither (Red Hen Press, 2023), which won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award 2021, and The House I Inherit (Finishing Line Press, 2019). She has been awarded fellowships from Tin House, VONA/Voices, and Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writers Lab. Her publications have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Asian American Writers' Workshop: The Margins, and elsewhere. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in Literature at the University of California, San Diego (Kumeyaay) where she researches Asian American queer and feminist aesthetics.
Poetry
“If Language is a Metaphor Between Sound and Meaning” and “Grandmother Says: New Theorems,” Hayden’s Ferry Review, 2023
“Ode to Sweet Potato Greens,” Moonroot, 2021
“In My Afterlife, I am Brightest,” “In the Present Sense,” “A Repeating Distance,” Crazyhorse, 2021
“The Beginning of the Beginning,” selected by Tracy K. Smith for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2021
“This is the Dream,” Prairie Schooner, 2020
“Traversence,” “The Beginning of the Beginning,” “Trịnh Công Sơn’s Children,” American Poetry Review, 2020
“Familiar Logic,” “In the Canals of Thought,” “Legacy / Inheritance / Fortune / Gia tài,” Puerto Del Sol, 2020
“We are a Long Cloth” and “For the Man Who Played Make Believe in My Bed,” Cosmonauts Avenue, 2019
“Exception,” “Everything Imagined That Was,” “Bà Nội, She Will Rest at Sea,” Juked, 2019
“Natural Melancholia,” Black Warrior Review, 2019
"Immigrant’s Lament" and "Migration's Undoing," Asian American Writers' Workshop's The Margins, 2018
“Country of Origin,” Duende, 2018
“Home-cooking,” Apogee, 2018
“Returning,” Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts, vol. 23, 2018
“Canary Verses,” Pink Progression, 2018
“May in Fruitvale,” “Helicopters,” “Growing Strength: A Prayer,” Tayo Literary Magazine, 2016
“What my Father Gave Me,” Cobalt Review, issue 4, 2016
Prose
“On Getting It Wrong: An Unconventional Reflection on Failure and Saying My Name” (Essay), Nat. Brut, 2021
“Let Me Be Honest,” Kenyon Review Online, 2019
Interviews & Reviews
“Paranoid Reality: Monica Sok’s A Nail The Evening Hangs On” (Review), The Rumpus, 2020
“A Conversation with Shane McCrae,” Adroit Journal, 2019
“The Mundane and the Miraculous: Interview with Keith S. Wilson,” TIMBER, 2018
“Book Review: Visuals and Loss in Ghost Of,” TIMBER, 2018
“Interview with mai c. đoan," TIMBER, 2017
Venues / Events Performed
(Selected) Innisfree Poetry Bookstory & Cafe, Boulder, CO; Counterpath Gallery, Denver, CO; Center for Visual Arts, MSU Denver; CU Boulder, Norlin Library British and Irish Studies Room; Club 156 at CU Boulder, Women's Resource Center's Sexpression show; Arc Gallery: Manila: Beyond the Envelope art show opening and Kearny Street Workshop celebration, SF; CIIS (California Institute of Integral Studies), SF; Viet Nam Victory Coalition: 40th Anniversary of the End of the U.S. War, Oakland; APEX Express (on KFPA 94.1 FM); UC Berkeley Multicultural Center; Eastside Arts Alliance: 3rd World Resistance Show, Oakland; WordsFirst at CounterPulse, SF
Academic Presentations
(Selected academic presentations)
“Failures and Refusals: Critical Fabulation and C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold”
“Ordinary Women, In the City of Contradictions: Poet Fay Chiang and Asian American and Black Women of Color Feminisms”
Academic Publications
“Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability by Vivian L. Huang (review)” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 27, no. 1 (2024)
Media
The Slowdown Show - Poet Major Jackson discusses Phuong’s poem “What Good is Silence,” 2024
Book Review - Christopher Spaide reviews A Plucked Zither on Poetry, 2023
VerseCurious - Benjamin Landry reviews A Plucked Zither, 2023
Book Review - Emily Velasquez reviews A Plucked Zither on Soapberry Review, 2023
The Slowdown Show - U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Límon discusses Phuong’s poem “The Beginning of the Beginning,”2022
Book Review - Paul Bonnell reviews The House I Inherit on DVAN, 2019
Books
A Plucked Zither
Phuong’s poetry collection, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, is now available for purchase.
“A Plucked Zither beautifully reckons with the ghosts of war and the emotional turmoil of being othered in a new land, while shedding greater light on the Vietnamese diaspora. In poems that thread the richness of her native tongue together with familial history and ancestral voices, Vuong ventures into the grief to reclaim the losses. Both exquisite in language and enduring in spirit, this collection pulses forward to demand a new remembrance.”
—Mai Der Vang, poet and author of Yellow Rain
“Engaged in the relational and polyvocality, the poems here speak across time and space, address generations, and disrupt linearity. Animated by ghosts, memory, and speaking across silences, multiply: ‘the sound of hovering / singing ready/ to swing into a world / picture it carving.’”
—Hoa Nguyen, poet and author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
The House I Inherit
Phuong’s book was reviewed on diaCritics!
Paul Bonnell writes, “I turn Vuong’s ‘new worlds’ over and over in my hands. My heart. My mind. I am drawn inward and across the Pacific Ocean. With her words, through her words, I brush my own brown body against others’.” Find his review here.
"The poems in this astonishing debut comprise a triptych consisting of altars, doors, and the Janus-like self-portraits which confront the past, legacy of war, and thresholds of love, heartbreak, and resilience. The House I Inherit offers to us the world we have wrecked through strife, silence, and violence. Here, ghosts love and lurk alike. Here “ghosts [who] do not follow borders” coexist with figures who are “so good / at surviving.” Vuong adroitly captures the dysfunction of immigrant families and “wounding of whole homes” while remaining open and steely to both familial and romantic loves. The result is tender, deft, and calmly urgent: this is an offering at the altar of a home which has no borders.
—Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost Of
This poetry articulates the hard things; the broken things; the beautiful, healing, loving things. This poetry piercingly reflects humanity back to itself. I am grateful to Phuong T. Vuong, for this poetry – which is so desperately needed, today more than ever.
—Sharon Bridgforth, 2016 Doris Duke Performing Artist, author of loveconjure/blues, the bull-jean stories, and other works
While for many of us grief is often too abstract a thing to behold, Vuong’s The House I Inherit captures it in its most present and to-the-bone form. In three parts, this careful and tender collection takes us through a father’s violence and the inheritance of trauma, attempts to redraw the self from this pain, and shows us a door through which we can reconcile our “artifacts of grief.” While the history of the Vietnam War, imperialism, and familial trauma each demand their own resounding narrative, The House I Inherit proposes the radical notion that silence can be both needle and thread, weaving together these narratives into a resonant whole. Vuong movingly writes, “everything not uttered carries/ a weight/ a life/ its own/ gathering speed.” These lines, as well as the poems within this book, are balm for anyone looking for a collection that believes that the quietest (and most resilient) gestures can accrue, suture, and someday heal us.
—Muriel Leung, author of Bone Confetti and Imagine Us, The Swarm
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