Susan Nguyen is the author of Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, POETRY, The American Poetry Review, and Poetry Northwest, among others. Her poem “Impossible Deer” won the 2022 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review, and she is the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and elsewhere. She is the editor in chief of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a member of the She Who Has No Master(s) collective.
I’ve never seen photos of my parents dancing and partying. Skipping stones. Skipping home. Children are children everywhere. But when I gift my parents a jigsaw puzzle made from a family photo, I learn my mother has never assembled one.…
