Hieu Minh Nguyen

“The worlds Nguyen summons and dismisses are mesmerizing, like the visions of a sorcerer, but not because they’re magical—because they’re real. All of them animated by a wild wit that feels like it could throw a car like a baseball.” —Alexander Chee

“[These poems] remind me of gravity, how it pins me to the world without ever touching me. Nguyen’s work is like that. A kind of force. Or better yet, a force of kindness.” —Ocean Vuong

“Nguyen’s voice feels simultaneously young and ageless, uncertain and wise. His poems are pitched somewhere between page and stage, as if said aloud right into your ear.” —NPR

“Hieu Minh Nguyen’s work is defiant in its tenderness.” –The Poetry Foundation

Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of two collections of poetry: This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry in 2015 and for the Minnesota Book Award; and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), which went on to win the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle.

Raised by a single mother, Nguyen writes from a place of occasional estrangement and dislocation. Tempered with a wry sense of humor, his recent poems in Not Here consider staying versus leaving, whether the places under consideration are memory, the Asian American diaspora, or the Midwest. The book is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia. In an interview with The Poetry Foundation on the labor of the collection, Nguyen said: “I thought a lot about the outcome of staying or leaving or the world I would miss out on if I chose to stay or the world that could happen if I left. There’s the quantum theory of it, of being haunted by the choice of both.” Terrance Hayes observed of the work: “‘Sometimes, to avoid a catastrophe: the disappearance of a limb or relative, you must make sure everything burns,’ we are told in Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Not Here. These brilliant poems illuminate those spaces between sincerity and mischief, vulnerability and audacity. Nguyen’s irrepressible warmth is fueled by honesty, longing, and curiosity. ‘Everything burns’ in this amazing collection. Not Here blazes and enlightens.”

Nguyen’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, the Atlantic, “Poem-a-Day” from the Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. He has received a number of awards and fellowships including the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a McKnight Writing Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship.

He is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Originally from the Twin Cities, Hieu now lives in Oakland and is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.

Short Bio

A queer Vietnamese American raised by a single mother, Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of two collections of poetry: This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry in 2015 and for the Minnesota Book Award; and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), which went on to win the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle. Nguyen is a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. His own work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, the New York Times, Best American Poetry, the Academy of American Poets, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. He has received a number of awards and fellowships including the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a McKnight Writing Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Originally from the Twin Cities, Hieu now lives in Oakland and is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.

Read What’s In Print

• Haunted by Survival: Hieu Minh Nguyen on vulnerability, whiteness, and why he loves the Midwest – The Poetry Foundation

• How ‘8 Mile’ inspired Hieu Minh Nguyen to write poems on queerness – Stanford Daily

• Hieu Minh Nguyen challenges white supremacy in poems about his family – PBS NewsHour

• A Hard Childhood Compressed Into Poetry with Concision and Heat – New York Times

• Book Review: Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Not Here – DVAN

• Absence and Other Inheritances: A Review of Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Not Here  – The Adroit Journal

Listen to Audio

• Hieu Minh Nguyen: “The Understudy” – Poem-a-day

• Read “Politics of an Elegy” by Hieu Minh Nguyen – On Being

Still, Somehow

As boys, your father fed us fresh meat
from the lake, taught us to spit
bones into the fire, handed us each a knife
told us to enter the woods & return with something dead
& when we returned with nothing but our bodies
he assumed we failed, but what did he know about death
that we couldn’t learn, will learn from our own hands
& because you aren’t here (won’t ever, again, be here)
to cover my mouth, I’ll confess, out loud, my love, so maybe
perhaps, you will hear me & join me, here where the sun is sweet
against the water & because I love you, I will gut this distance
with nostalgia, because grief can taste of sugar if you run
your tongue along the right edge, so let me call your name
or rather mouth it, like when we watched your father strike a cleaver
into the neck of a hawk & fell silent, not because of the blood
but rather for the way the hawk’s severed body
took flight, leaving behind its head, a scarlet burden in the soil
& I wish so badly, I was brave enough then, to keep it
to tuck it beneath my tongue for these twenty years
because darling, before I came alive, I watched the world
without knowing what to look for, but I swear, it was there, again
above the tall grass, the headless hawk
still alive, still, somehow, flying.

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