Phuong T. Vuong is a writer, scholar, educator, and sometimes visual artist. She is interested in speaking to and calling out the silences in the Vietnamese American and Asian American experience. She longs to celebrate and cultivate power as much as shed light on dark secrets. If tradition teaches us to never overturn graves, Phuong believes artists can dig into darkness and find much-needed truths, becoming familiar with our ghosts. This includes but is not limited to writing about love, sex, war, trauma, race, and other topics. As a 1.5 generation immigrant, born in Viet Nam, she writes about diaspora—experiences in Asia as well as at home in Oakland, California and the U.S. She examines how to hold multiple identities without being torn asunder. By weaving language and slips in time and meaning, she interrogates the ways language fails and supports us. She hopes to complicate ideas of fixed culture and identity and to question the underlying norms of the English language and Western thought. By sharing truths and lies, she strives to humanize her communities and interrogate oppressive systems.
Send questions, comments and corrections to info@creativewritingmfa.info.
Disclaimer: No endorsement of these ratings should be implied by the writers and writing programs listed on this site, or by the editors and publishers of Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.