Write a paragraph about your family.

Diana Khoi Nguyen

At the moment, my family is American.

We are four people, not five.

My father and mother were Vietnamese in 1975.

They are engineers,

they engineered

a new life here

in California, where they met.

They have three children,

two girls and one boy.

The eldest daughter is a writer,

the younger daughter works in a hospital.

The younger son has died.

They do not live in the same house.

Soon, they might be Vietnamese or dead.

All of them will be dead.

Copyright © 2024 by Diana Khoi Nguyen. (P) 2024 Simon & Schuster, LLC. All rights reserved. From the forthcoming book ROOT FRACTURES: Poems by Diana Khoi Nguyen to be published by Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC and Simon & Schuster Audio, a Division of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Colorado Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Nguyen has also received awards from the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry Contest, the Key West Literary Seminars, and the Academy of American Poets. She teaches creative writing at Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Originally published:
January 24, 2024

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