Susan Nguyen

Susan Nguyen’s debut poetry collection, Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. 

Nguyen’s poetry often explores the body and how geography, history, and trauma leave marks both visible and invisible. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, Poetry, The Rumpus, Tin House, and other publications.

In 2022, she received the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. She is an alumna of the Hedgebrook Writers-in-Residence Program, the Jentel Artist Residency, Hambidge, and Idyllwild Writers Week. Her work has received support from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. PBS NewsHour spotlighted Nguyen as one of “three women poets to watch in 2018.”

Nguyen earned a BA in English from Virginia Tech and an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. She taught creative writing at Arizona State University and the National University of Singapore, and is the Senior Editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Beyond reading and writing, Nguyen’s hobbies include photography, zinemaking, hiking, and being outdoors.