How did you become a writer? I think in some ways I’m still becoming—but it happened/is happening because I’ve made a concerted effort to write, to be a literary figure who publishes, and to be a literary citizen who engages in the literary community! As a child I wanted to write children’s books and wrote dozens of illustrated stories in my composition notebooks—then I wrote to cope with the circumstances and emotion of my life through my teen years—then began to pursue the writing of poetry with a focus on thinking about craft starting in my undergraduate time at UCLA—to my MFA at Columbia—after which I tried to unlearn what I’d been taught to figure out what was essential for me as a writer/thinker person. Through all of this, I’ve been writing and most of the time fail to capture what I thought I might encounter on the page—only to try again and again. In this way, I am constantly trying to become a writer. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Too many to remember, but a sampling: Teachers: Cal Bedient and Lucie Brock-Broido. Writers: Susan Howe, Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Clarice Lispector, Brian Dillon, Layli Long Soldier, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Arthur Sze, Carl Phillips, Myung Mi Kim, Sun Young Shin, Douglas Kearney, Tyehimba Jess, Victoria Chang, Don Mee Choi, Alex Ross.

When and where do you write? I write every summer and winter (December), in 15-day intervals. Sometimes in my home office, sometimes at residencies or while traveling (Hawaii, SE Asia). 

What are you working on now? A prose project that I won’t call fiction or nonfiction—based on the process filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung describes as his method for writing Minari: by writing out 100 memories then finding the a path through them. Which is to say: I’m working with personal and familial memories. At its heart, the project is a ghost story and about how we grieve over time.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Yes and no—I think writer’s block in that I reject what my mind wants to put to the page, but doesn’t yet know how or what wants to be uttered. The last time this happened was in the early months after my first book was published: the poems I wrote during that post-publication time felt like residual aftershocks of poems that could’ve been in the first book, which frustrated me. It turns out I just needed more time away from the published manuscript and more time just being in the world, soaking things up like a sponge. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? To never stop writing, no matter what happens in one’s life. 

What’s your advice to new writers? My advice is to avoid looking at what peers might be doing, and to focus on what is most essential and core to your work—and to create the conditions in which happy accidents might occur on the page. 

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (2018) which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and forthcoming collection, Root Fractures (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.