Khaty Xiong

FELIX: A Series of New Writing poetry reading, Room 6191. Free.

press release: Khaty Xiong is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Poor Anima (Apogee Press, 2015), and three chapbooks: Ode to the Far Shore (Platypus Press, 2016), Deer Hour (New Michigan Press, 2014), and Elegies (University of Montana, 2013). Her honors include a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, residencies at MacDowell, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, and two Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council. Xiong’s work has been featured in the following publications: Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry Society of America and Academy of American Poets websites, and elsewhere. In 2018, her poem, “On Visiting the Franklin Park Conservatory & Botanical Gardens” was highlighted in an immersive poetry installation at the Poetry Foundation Gallery in Chicago, a collaboration between the Poetry Foundation and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, centering on the conversation of grief and loss. In 2019, she was awarded Best of the Net for her poem, “Year of the Cardinal’s Song (VII).” She is the Spring 2022 Artist-in-Residence at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

Currently, Xiong is working on her second poetry collection which examines the entanglement of her mother’s violent death, the grief that comes with being a child of war refugees, and the impact intergenerational trauma has had on her identity as a Hmong American poet and researcher. This body of grief work is an ode to the inability to “return home” as a descendant of illiterate diasporans, interrogating, as well as creating, myths around mothers, death, and gardens.

This event is co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund from the English department and the Asian American Studies Program.