Mai Der Vang

Mai Der Vang is the author of Afterland (Graywolf, 2017) which received the Walt Whitman Award
of the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, New Republic, and elsewhere. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. Mai Der’s work has also been anthologized in Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora. As an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle, she is co-editor of How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology. Mai Der has received residencies from Hedgebrook and is a Kundiman fellow. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of California, Berkeley, along with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing/Poetry from Columbia University. She lives in Fresno, California.

water grave

We cross under
the midnight shield
and learn that bullets

can curse the air.
A symposium
of endangered stars

evicts itself to
the water. Another
convoy leaves the kiln.

The crowded dead
turn into the earth’s
unfolded bed sheet.

We drift near banks,
creatures of the Mekong,
heads bobbing like

ghosts without bodies,
toward the farthest shore.
With every treading

soak, the wading leg,
we beg ourselves to live,
to float the mortared

cartilage and burial
tissue in this river yard
of amputated hearts.

From Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017)

Links

• “Mai Der Vang’s and Airea D. Matthews’s Striking Débuts.” The New Yorker. 15 May 2017.
• “Interrogation and Transmigration: On Layli Long Soldier’s ‘Whereas’ and Mai Der Vang’s ‘Afterland.'” 20 April 2017.
• The Brooklyn Rail Interview with Alex Dueben. 1 June 2017.

Media

Seminar with Solmaz Sharif | January 30, 2018

Reading with Solmaz Sharif | January 30, 2018