An Evening of Poetry with Cindy Juyoung Ok, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Paul Tran

This is an in person event at A Room of One’s Own.

About the books

In Ward Toward Ok moves assuredly between spaces—from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided cities to separated countries, from a bedroom that is the site of domestic abuse to a hospice ward that is the site of neglect. Ok plumbs the connections between these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of language, word to word, as she uncovers not only fissures and confinement but hope, humor, and connection. Using visual poetry and found text, she counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person’s character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok’s energizing debut begins the work of breaking language to find the fissures where it can be re-assembled into a new reality.

Root Fractures is a haunting of a family’s past upon its present, and a frank reckoning with how loss and displacement transform mothers and daughters across generations. In Root Fractures, Nguyen excavates the moments of rupture in a family: a mother who was forced underground after the Fall of Saigon, a father who engineered a new life in California as an immigrant, a brother who cut himself out of every family picture before cutting himself out of their lives entirely. And as new generations of the family come of age, opportunities to begin anew blend with visitations from the past. Through poems of disarming honesty and personal risk, Nguyen examines what takes root after a disaster and how we can make a story out of the broken pieces of our lives. This astonishing second collection renders poetry into an act of kintsugi, embellishing what is broken in a family’s legacy so that it can be seen in a new light.

Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran’s debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran’s poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward, which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. She is a former high school science teacher and current Kenyon Review fellow teaching poetry at Kenyon College. A MacDowell fellow, she also edits and translates poetry.

Diana Khoi Nguyen, poet and multimedia artist, was born and raised in California. Her debut poetry collection Ghost Of was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest and was a finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It received the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Colorado Book Award. A Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese diasporic artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s), Nguyen’s other honors include awards from the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry Contest, Key West Literary Seminars, and Academy of American Poets. She teaches creative writing at Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling (Penguin, 2022), which won the Golden Poppy Award and was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Lambda Literary Award. Their work appears in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.