Growing From Our Roots: An Asian Debut Showcase is an AWP offsite reading series that started with a Twitter DM (LOL). Since their poetry collections debuted in fall 2021, Susan Nguyen and Joshua Nguyen have been scheming to get debut Asian voices in front of you.
Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Writers' League of Texas Discovery Award, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021) and Hidden Labor & The Naked Body (Sundress Publications, 2023). He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kenyon Review, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in Wildness, The Texas Review, Honey Literary, and elsewhere. He is a humor editor for The Offing Mag and is a professional dilly-dallyier. He received his MFA/PhD from The University of Mississippi. He currently teaches at Tufts University.
Joshua Nguyen, Co-Organizer
Susan Nguyen’s debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, an Outstanding Achievement Award in Poetry from the Association of Asian American Studies, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, The American Poetry Review, The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), POETRY, The Rumpus, Tin House, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the 2022 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. She is currently the editor in chief of Hayden’s Ferry Review.
