I think I speak for many when I say
it's difficult in this day and age
to read an entire book of poetry in one sitting.
Yet with Susan Nguyen's debut collection, Dear Diaspora,
when I looked down, I was on page one
and when I looked back up, I had finished the book.
Susan's poems brought to life a period of time in my own
that was quite lonely, that I kept hidden within myself.
A childhood of silence, questions, and noticing things
I could not explain.
Yet it felt like the collection's title alone, Dear
Diaspora, was addressed to me, a daughter of immigrants
in a majority white Virginia town.
And the poems were telling me, listen,
you're not making any of this up because I've been there too.
I love how Dear Diaspora opens with questions
that probe beneath the surface.
Like, do you feel safe wrecking language?
When did you lose the color green?
And introduces us to a character, Suzi, who, quote,
"is not afraid of the dark or the things that move in its
current."
Suzi's observations of her Vietnamese diaspora upbringing
in America, and the risks and losses
it poses for her and her family, create an opening
within language itself.
Susan's more recent poems, which draw their inspiration from her
mother's English language learning workbook from
the '90s, continue along this thread of curiosity,
of noticing and questioning.
These new poems bend preexisting formulaic approaches
to language, forging space for what
lies beneath resilience, grief, possibility, defiance,
and reinvention.
I feel so lucky to have connected with Susan,
not only on the page, but off of it as well.
And her presence has enriched me,
like the best writerly friendships do,
as both a poet and a person.
Indeed, Susan works diligently to foster community
among and uplift the work of poets and writers
through her role as senior editor at Hayden's Ferry Review,
an international literary journal published
by Arizona State University.
In addition to her book Dear Diaspora, which
won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and Outstanding
Achievement Award from the Association of Asian-American
Studies, a New Mexico Arizona Book Award,
and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award,
Susan's poems have been nominated
for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize,
and have appeared in Poetry magazine, the Academy
of American Poets Poem-a-Day series,
the American Poetry Review, and many other places.
Please join me in extending a warm welcome to Susan Nguyen.
[APPLAUSE]