Lyric Archipelagos: A Poetics of Diaspora and Grief

Poetry Reading / GLAM - Guest Lectures in American Studies Münster

Diana Khoi Nguyen / Poet (University of Pittsburgh)k

© American Studies

Join us as Diana Khoi Nguyen reads from her poetry, followed by an engaging conversation with Gulsin Ciftci.
Diana Khoi Nguyen’s poetry explores the haunting intersections of loss, memory, and family across generations, grappling with the ways displacement and grief transform those we love. Her debut collection, Ghost Of, serves as a mourning song, written after her brother who erased himself from family photographs before disappearing from their lives entirely. Ghost Of is an unflinching act of reaching across time, space, and absence, wrestling with what remains in the wake of loss. In her second collection, Root Fractures, Nguyen further excavates her family’s ruptured history. Through poems of raw honesty, Nguyen examines how past traumas reverberate into the present and asks what new roots might take hold in the fractured soil of a family’s shared story.
Poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of the chaplet Unless (Belladonna*, 2019) and poetry collections: Ghost Of (Omnidawn, 2018), a finalist for the National Book Award and recipient of the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery and Colorado Book Awards, and Root Fractures (Scribner, 2024). Her writing appears in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Asymptote; her video work was exhibited at the Miller ICA in 2023. A MacDowell and Kundiman fellow, as well as a member of the Vietnamese diasporic artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s), Nguyen’s other honors include winning a "Discovery" Poetry Contest, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an artist-in-residence at Brown University, and writer-in-residence at UCLA. Currently, she teaches creative writing in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA program and is Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
This event is hosted by American Studies, University of Münster. The event is free and open to the public.

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