Hieu Minh Nguyen
Author of
Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018)
This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014)
Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of two collections of poetry, This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), which went on to win the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. Some awards and fellowships Hieu has received include: 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. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, Best American Poetry, Poetry London, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Hieu lives in Oakland and is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.
Instagram / hieuminhnguyen.com / Represented by Annie Hwang
Books by Hieu
Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018)
A flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book.
Nguyen’s poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved.
This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014)
The poems in Hieu Minh Nguyen’s debut collection are a fearless and brutal dissection of nostalgia, trauma, and desire. The ghosts haunting This Way to the Sugar keep every poem either well fed or drooling, reminding us to “Take this body and see a body, where so many see a grave.” These poems miss you terribly.