Marcia H. HowardAuthor in Residence

A poet and multimedia artist, DIANA KHOI NGUYEN is the author of Root Fractures (2024) and Ghost Of (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her video work has been exhibited at the Miller ICA. Nguyen is a MacDowell and Kundiman fellow, and a member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). She’s received an NEA fellowship and awards from the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery contests. She teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

ABOUT Root Fractures (Scribner, 2024)

*One of LitHub’s Poetry Books to Read in 2024*
*One of The Millions’s Must Read Poetry Books of Winter 2024*

National Book Award finalist Diana Khoi Nguyen’s second poetry collection, a haunting of a family’s past upon its present, and a frank reckoning with how loss and displacement transform mothers and daughters across generations.

In Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen excavates the moments of rupture in a family: a mother who was forced underground after the Fall of Saigon, a father who engineered a new life in California as an immigrant, a brother who cut himself out of every family picture before cutting himself out of their lives entirely. And as new generations of the family come of age, opportunities to begin anew blend with visitations from the past. Through poems of disarming honesty and personal risk, Nguyen examines what takes root after a disaster and how we can make a story out of the broken pieces of our lives.

As Terrance Hayes writes, “‘There is nothing that is not music’ for this poet. Poetry is found in the gaps, silences, and ruptures of history.” This astonishing second collection renders poetry into an act of kintsugi, embellishing what is broken in a family’s legacy so that it can be seen in a new light.

EVENTS with DIANA

Creative Writing Party Featuring Author in Residence Diana Khoi Nguyen

When: Wednesday, May 8 at 5:00 pm
Where: Grace M. Hunt Memorial English Reading Room, Kaplan Hall 235

Photo of Diana Khoi Nguyen: Karen Lue