Wildness: On Parenthood and Writing with Jennifer Cheng & Diana Khoi Nguyen

Diana Khoi Nguyen and Jennifer S. Cheng discuss the practice of writing and parenting.

Poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018) which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the forthcoming collection, Root Fractures (Scribner 2024). Nguyen is a Kundiman fellow, recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Currently, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Jennifer S. Cheng received her BA from Brown University, MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa, and MFA in Poetry from San Francisco State University. She is the author of MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize and named a “Best Book of 2018” by Publishers Weekly and Entropy magazine; House A, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize; and Invocation: An Essay, an image-text chapbook. She is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, U.S. Fulbright scholar, Kundiman fellow, Bread Loaf work-study scholar, MacDowell fellow and the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Award, the Ann Fields Poetry Award, the Mid-American Review Fineline Prize and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poetry, lyric essays, and image-text work appear in Tin House, AGNI, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Magazine, The Normal School, DIAGRAM, Catapult, Lit Hub and elsewhere. Having grown up in Texas, Hong Kong and Connecticut, she lives in rapture of the coastal prairies of northern California. She is a founding member of The Ruby and participates in women-curated experiments at Drop Leaf Press

A partnership with Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN)