Using complex formal innovations, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut poetry collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018) grapples with her brother’s suicide, gathering lyrical lines into forms that echo and reconstruct the shapes left behind following her brother’s removal of his image from family photos. The Michigan Quarterly Review writes that Nguyen’s poetry and multimedia artistry “implicates a whole world of ghosts— of refugees, childhood figments, past versions of ourselves— and pushes us to consider how our own bodies are constituted by accumulation of loss.” Ghost Of was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest and was a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. Nguyen currently teaches creative writing at Randolph College’s Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
