Diana Khoi Nguyen
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Kate Tufts Discovery Award Winner
& National Book Award Finalist! 
Ghost Of is truly a brilliant book. Its textual innovations are immediately notable. They recall the work of Douglas Kearney or perhaps Tyehimba Jess’s Olio. Here too, amazing poetry happens inside the visual dynamics...These poems sing to and for the ghosts of identity, history and culture; they sing like a ghost who looks from the window or waits by the door. Ghost Of is unforgettable.
—Terrance Hayes, Judge of the Omnidawn Open Poetry Book Contest Nguyen writes with haunted precision and wondrous innovation. —Cathy Park Hong, Guggenheim Fellow |
Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen was born & raised in California. She earned a BA in English & Communication Studies from UCLA, an MFA from Columbia University, & a PhD from the University of Denver.
She is the author of the chaplet Unless (Belladonna*, 2019) & debut poetry collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018). Ghost Of was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest, & was a finalist for the National Book Award & L.A. Times Book Prize. It received the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award & the Colorado Book Award. Her poetry & prose have appeared widely in magazines and journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, & PEN America. A Kundiman fellow, Nguyen’s other honors include awards from the 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Contest, Key West Literary Seminars, & the Academy of American Poets. She has held scholarships & fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, & the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Randolph College Low-Residency MFA & will be joining the University of Pittsburgh as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2020. Instagram: @fitproblems 
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Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of is nothing short of an extraordinary debut. At its center is the haunting disappearance of a brother, gone by suicide. These poems are uncanny renderings of an invisibility made visible by the sheer will of candor, bemused forms, agility of lexicon, and a voice, almost noiselessly extravagant. What she gives us, she takes away; nearly impossible transformations transform. “Something keeps not happening” she writes. And then she causes it to happen in a language of grief --bold and often colder than most daring, exquisite acts.
Nothing here is ever entirely complete-- ghost of mourning, ghost of yearning, ghost of the kiln unfilled with the probable impossibility of an afterlife. It is as if a medieval scholar were transcribing an ancient Latin manuscript, pieces of script are missing, illegible, annulled by time. The scholar writes in the margins Desunt Non Nulla— signifying—Not No Things Are Missing, Nguyen’s voice is both wraithlike and astonishingly frontal; this is one of the most gifted first books I’ve read.
—Lucie Brock-Broido, Guggenheim Fellow
Nothing here is ever entirely complete-- ghost of mourning, ghost of yearning, ghost of the kiln unfilled with the probable impossibility of an afterlife. It is as if a medieval scholar were transcribing an ancient Latin manuscript, pieces of script are missing, illegible, annulled by time. The scholar writes in the margins Desunt Non Nulla— signifying—Not No Things Are Missing, Nguyen’s voice is both wraithlike and astonishingly frontal; this is one of the most gifted first books I’ve read.
—Lucie Brock-Broido, Guggenheim Fellow