I’m the youngest of three daughters, a collector of small bowls and a lover of Vietnamese food. I celebrated my first birthday by selecting items from an assortment of artifacts that would determine my future profession. I chose a pen and a whistle, meaning I’d become a writer and an enforcer of some sort of order, so the story goes…. I’m still in the process of becoming.
I hold a Bachelor of Science from the School of Journalism and Mass Communications with a degree in Advertising & minor in Creative Writing, and a Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing with a dual-genre terminal degree in Poetry & Fiction. My work explores the subjects of identity, the feminine voice and the Southeast Asian diaspora experience. I often write lyrical, persona and confessional poems in both traditional verse and free verse. I’m especially fond of the French triolet and villanelle.
I’m currently editing a collection of haiku and senryū and writing a poetic memoir about girlhood, a hybrid book that includes poetry, prose and art.
Before this life, where I scratch out poems and paintings for a living, my profession was art director for an advertising & marketing firm and creative director & owner of a graphic design agency.
I was born in Sa Đéc, Việt Nam, a French colonial town south in the Mekong Delta. This was where I learned to walk, talk, read and love the natural world; where I climbed trees and fell out of trees, where I was bitten by leeches and fire ants, where I taught myself to ride a bicycle, drawing concentric circles in the dirt around a centipede-infested tree trunk.
During the monsoons, delta rain came down suddenly and in warm sheets; the soil steamed, released a fertile mud odor that penetrated all senses and can never be forgotten. On humid nights, fireflies lit up the dark countryside and a symphony of frogs and crickets provided the soundtrack for my childhood sleep.
On the morning of my ninth birthday, I carried a child-size, cerise-colored suitcase and left on a journey that eventually led me to California. On the walk to fetch the xích lô driver to take us to the bus station, a stray dog bit my right butt cheek; we both yelped and hollered—one from pain and fright, the other with satisfaction and mild curiosity. A shaving of my flesh stayed wedged between the dog’s teeth as it trotted off and disappeared into the bustles of the day. When I look back on that moment, I’m grateful to have given a piece of myself to my birth place.
My poetic instincts are rooted in the malleable redness of Sa Đéc clay and in the vibrations of a scarred land that is now both intimately familiar and foreign to me. It is the poetry of missing and of forgetting, the poetry of the body and of the gut.
