Paul Tran
Photo courtesy of Paul Tran
Bio
Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling, forthcoming from Penguin Poets in 2022. Their work appears in the New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere, including the Lionsgate movie Love Beats Rhymes with Azealia Banks, Common, and Jill Scott. They earned their BA in history from Brown University and MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, where they were the Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow and Senior Poetry Fellow in the writing program. A recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Tran is currently poetry editor at the Offing Magazine and a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.
Growing up in San Diego, few people in my immediate life spoke, read, or wrote in English. From Vietnam my mother came as a refugee to the United States in 1989. She worked as a seamstress to support me and our family across the Pacific. The violence I faced as a new American and survivor of rape, as a queer and transgender person of color, drove me to be the first in my community to go to college and through poetry repudiate false accounts cast about us by state actors and by literature propagating state goals.
This fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts makes possible the completion of my first book, All the Flowers Kneeling. The book seeks to understand why sexual violence occurs and how a survivor learns to trust, love, and again cultivate inalienable joys. Organized in four sections, the poems move from the aftermath into family history, interrogating how my mother, also a survivor, taught me to detach from the past and to wield beauty as a weapon for mitigating trauma. In a long poem—an invented form that I call “the Hydra”—my speaker and I ultimately learn that survival, like violence, is random and incalculable: whether the choice is beauty or ugliness, detachment or attachment, there’s no “right” or “good” way to persist except to persist. Nothing is guaranteed but everything is possible if my speaker and I decide to live, desire, and demand the desires and life we deserve.
As a poet and a teacher of poetry, with this support from the NEA, I’ll demonstrate that every poem is an argument about the making of poetry itself: the poem, to me, isn’t expression but enactment; it isn’t announcement but discovery.