Paul Tran
Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow
& Winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize! ![]()
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Paul Tran won the Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from Poetry Magazine & the Poetry Foundation and the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize.
Currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Paul's debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, is forthcoming from Penguin Books. Their work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, & elsewhere, including the Lionsgate movie Love Beats Rhymes with Azealia Banks, Common, & Jill Scott. They are the first Asian American since 1993 to win the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam, placing top 10 at the Individual World Poetry Slam & top 2 at the National Poetry Slam. Paul earned their M.F.A. in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, where they were the Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow & Senior Poetry Fellow, & is the Poetry Editor at The Offing, which won a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize from the Whiting Foundation. Twitter: @speakdeadly Instagram: @speakdeadly |
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Paul Tran is deeply deserving of this award. Their poems engage through compelling subject matter: some discuss the devastating impact of the American war in Vietnam on Tran’s homeland and family, while others describe violent and traumatic moments in the poet’s life. Throughout, Tran remains sensitive and vulnerable, honest and resilient. Beyond content, these poems also engage through advanced poetic technique, narrative complexity, multilingualism, and formal innovation. To read these poems fully is to gather the elegant evidence of survival and to witness testimony of “extraordinary design.”
-Craig Santos Perez, Judges' Citation, Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize
The precision in Paul Tran’s poems unites language, sound, and image with a tender and unflinching voice, one whose wisdom tells us homes can be taken or harmed but also (re)created. Tran’s work is undeniable.
-Khadijah Queen, author of I'm So Fine
-Craig Santos Perez, Judges' Citation, Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize
The precision in Paul Tran’s poems unites language, sound, and image with a tender and unflinching voice, one whose wisdom tells us homes can be taken or harmed but also (re)created. Tran’s work is undeniable.
-Khadijah Queen, author of I'm So Fine