TRUONG TRAN

I wanted to start by asking you about traveling. Since we started corresponding, I’ve noticed you mentioned it a few times. Is it something you enjoy? What's it like for you visiting these different academic spaces, especially given that this new book, How to Exi(s)t, is about racism in academia?

I love traveling when it’s about visiting people in my community. I wish traveling for work and traveling to promote the book had the same feeling, but the truth of the matter is, it’s a form of work. And what’s embedded in that work is a performance. To show up and to be present and to perform, and that has never been entirely comfortable to me. But it’s a responsibility that I embrace—as someone who published a book, and as someone committed to doing the work of promoting the book for the press. What I enjoy is the engagement with individuals within those spaces. More often than not, the students come to me with very profound questions. It’s very enlightening to me. In the book, I write about a moment when a black student raised her hand and asked me, “How do you breathe in a place like this?” I remember that moment so clearly. In that instance, I didn’t have an answer. I received it. I held it. In hindsight, I was able to write a response to her. I don’t know if she'll ever pick up the book, but I did give a response. 

I have also had other experiences like the one where I was at Harvard, and I experienced the academy in a way that was very enlightening, but also very challenging. When the reading happened, they set up the room in half circles. And without anyone being given a cue, all the professors came and sat in the first row. All the graduate students sat in the half circle behind them, and then everyone else just grabbed the seats behind those two half circles, undergrads and people in the community. I just thought, “Wow, to have that bird’s-eye view of the academy.” I met a young man at that reading who is Vietnamese, and he really gravitated towards me. When the reading ended, the faculty took us to the faculty club for dinner, and I invited him. He refused to go at first. He didn’t have very good things to relay to me about his experiences, and he refused to go. 

But I convinced him to go. I told him: “Listen, you are doing this really difficult work of connecting and putting yourself out into the world, and you want to make a difference. To be very honest, the people that you need to network with and shake hands with are not folks like myself. These are the people who hold the power and who can support your endeavors.” He came with me to this dinner, but I’ll never forget what ensued. We were sitting in this faculty club, having dinner, having conversations, and I could not help but acknowledge that everyone serving us was Vietnamese. That is part of the experience of traveling and engaging in these spaces. I always feel as though I’m the guest in these spaces, and the thing about being a guest, as Bhanu Kapil puts it in her writing: You’re welcome until you’re not welcome.

This is all making me think about one of the essays in the book, “On curation, inclusion, and the invitation to come in,” where one of your students comes to a reading you were hosting at your house. But instead of coming inside, they watched the reading from outside your home while the mostly white audience sat inside. For you, as a teacher and writer, I’m curious what about these academic spaces feels natural and unnatural, genuine and disingenuous, spoken and unspoken, possible and impossible?

 I guess I should begin answering that question by stating clearly that I don’t see myself as much of an academic. I’m a teacher. That’s what I do. Tucked inside that definition of being a teacher is the work of being a writer, a poet, and an artist. But it’s tucked inside, first and foremost. The engagement with my students feels very genuine. I think part of that comes from the fact that I was such a bad student myself. Not because I was lazy, but because I had severe dyslexia and I had to find ways to navigate through classrooms and those settings. I was never a good student, but being a bad student in some ways makes me a better teacher. I really believe that because I have these out-of-body experiences where I see myself sitting there next to my students, struggling with them, struggling to find a voice and to find a way to speak in a world that tells you: you don't have a voice.

I believe there’s another level of teaching that happens. Teaching that goes beyond the notion of craft or the learned sentence. There’s a teaching that says, “I see you, and you see me. And we’re going to figure out ways to move through this space together.” As teacher and student, but also as fellow human beings. That is what I wanted to say to that young student who asked me: “How do you breathe in a place like this?” I failed her in that moment, but I did write later. It is your right to breathe, to breathe loudly and breathe proudly.

Listening to you is making me think of the career path of a literary writer and the costs of this path. How cognizant were you of the costs of being creative in these academic spaces? Is it something that was ever talked about when you were starting out as a writer?

 I was clueless. I was young. I was ambitious in some ways. Back in the day, I wanted to be an academic. I thought that was what the ultimate goal should be, but what it really was about was acceptance. I wanted to be accepted into that space. But I was never accepted. My presence in that space always had a condition to it. My presence was to veil the movement of someone else through that space. It’s no coincidence that when the chair of a department hires her husband, she also gives me a carrot because I moved as a veil for the other; in this case, a white man.

With that said, I had no clue. I moved through that world thinking, “Oh, I’m being accepted.” It began to reveal itself to me slowly over time. It happened again and again and again, until this last time where I had to stand up for myself. I interviewed. I believe I did a stellar job. Then they pulled my application at the last minute and said I didn’t meet the criteria of the written job ad, so therefore, I couldn’t be ranked. I stood up and I challenged it. I went through a whole legal process only to then find in legal discovery that one of my colleagues wrote, and I kid you not: “Truong is a nice guy, but he’s just a poet.” That is remarkable to me because I spent my entire life wanting to be a poet.

 Here was that moment when everything that I’ve strived to be was flipped on its head, and I was told I was “just a poet.” Who gets to say that, that you’re just this or you're just that, in such a way? But that, again, is the manipulation of language and the wielding of language. Remarkably so, he’s a poet.

In the beginning of the book, you make this distinction between being a writer and a poet. Earlier, you said, I'm a teacher first. Why do you identify as a teacher first? What experiences have shaped your understanding of these identities? 

I didn't always feel this way. I started out wanting to be a writer. Teaching was a way to keep me close to writing. The two are intertwined, I thought. I thought that in order to be a writer, the occupation that would sustain my livelihood was teaching. Then I started to teach. I realized that the love I had was to teach, is to teach—first, last, and foremost.

I think I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: I don’t think I’m the type of writer who is going to be quoted, or people will remember my writing. But I think that I find my connection with the world, with individuals, with my students through the work of teaching. When I went to New York to launch How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir, the most remarkable thing happened to me. In the audience at the bookstore, four of my former students showed up. I’m not talking about students in their 20s. I’m talking about 40-year-old individuals that I taught some 20 years ago. The fact that two are teachers now— I love that. That’s probably the greatest gift that I could receive.

The subtitle for your book is “a poet’s memoir.” What do you think when you meet young aspiring poets who are similar to how you were, ambitious and passionate about writing? What do you say to poets who are at the beginning of their careers?

Honestly, I don’t know. Every time is different. But I will say that the commitment I’ve made to myself—and I hope that I’m able to uphold this commitment—is to be honest with them. They come to me with a lot of questions and a lot of aspirations, and I want to respond to them with honesty about their endeavor. And that begins with acknowledgement and celebration of their desire to speak and write. I’m not going to sugarcoat it, and I’m not going to cushion the possible fall that might occur for each and every one of us as writers.

Honesty. It’s a huge commitment for me to make at this point. It’s become a constraint in my writing. I want to be as honest as I can possibly be while at the same time holding on to the artistry of what I do. But it has to feel honest to me. Let me correct that. It’s not an issue of feeling honest. It has to be honest.

This new book, How to Exi(s)t: a Poet’s Memoir, is nonfiction. What was the appeal of writing a book of nonfiction? What’s the appeal of the essay form for you? What has it helped you access? 

Well, I wanted to move away from metaphor, which I associate with poetry. That was a conscious effort on my part. Secondly, I wanted clarity. I wanted to write in a way that felt like I was saying something directly. I was holding my gaze on a subject that was important to me. The form of the essay really allowed me to do that. But also, the essay is remarkable because it allowed me to fail.

The very definition of an essay is an attempt. I think this book is, in some ways, full of failure, too. But I think giving that failure a voice is really important because it’s not a product in the end; it’s the process of moving through. The essay allows for that. I also didn’t want to hide, and I didn’t want to give others the opportunity to hide in my metaphor.

Your past work has been categorized as experimental or avant-garde? What do you make of these terms?

Well, I never saw myself as avant-garde or experimental. I did in some ways adopt those terms because it was something that was put on me again and again. But I’ll tell you something, I had a conversation with my dear, dear friend and mentor, Wanda Coleman.

I was very young, and I said to her, “I want to be able to write in a way that’s abstract and experimental. I want to be given that opportunity.” And Wanda said to me, “Abstraction is just another veil for racism.” She put the smack down on me. I mean, Wanda does that quite often. Half of our correspondences feel like an argument, but it was really quite the learning experience for me. Those words really stayed with me.

But I had to go through it, and I had to write my way through that desire to arrive at this yearning for clarity. But also, I don’t know if I would have gotten here if all of this other shit didn’t happen to me. Would I have been a different human being, or a different writer, had I been accepted by the academy? I don’t know. But I don’t regret writing the book that I never wanted to write. I don’t wish that it was different.

I love that story. I think it’s something that a lot of writers can relate to—that idea of wanting to find a style or voice and perhaps even wanting to hide inside of it. As a writer and teacher, how do you navigate the discourse of craft and genre? And how has that changed over time? 

To me, craft and genre are just inquiries. The more important consideration for myself and, I believe, my students is not structures and form, but rather questions. The entirety of my career, as a writer and teacher, can be summed up in one question and perhaps one word, which is: why? Why are you the person to do what you’re doing? Why does it matter? Why do you care? Why? I just recently engaged with some students in New York and one of the students said, “Sometimes I don't want to have to write about myself or to give you an answer to these questions.” That was profound for me to hear.

 I wanted to acknowledge where she was coming from with that. So, I revised my own thinking a little bit. I think what it is is that I’m going to continue to ask these questions. But that doesn’t mean that you must give me an answer. What I’m hoping is that you have the answers for yourself. I think that’s so much more important. Know the answers to these questions for yourself. You get to hold on to those answers if you want because you get to claim your private life as a writer. You don’t have to perform your otherness and to divulge your trauma. As a writer, and I say this to you, and I say this to those who are reading, who are writers of color: the world will expect that of you. But that doesn’t mean that you have to give in to that expectation. 

One of my mentors said to me, and I’ll always remember, she said, “Be careful of the stage that you’re building. Once you build it, you may find yourself performing on it, whether or not you want to.”

The anxiety of performance is something I think a lot of writers of color struggle with so thank you for saying that. It’s making me think about how relationships really seem to fuel your writing. In How to Exi(s)t and Book of the Other, I felt that relationships were powering the writing forward, good, bad, or indifferent. The writing is kind of called into being by these relationships you have with colleagues, friends, family. Same thing in 100 Words that you co-wrote with Damon Potter. I think that’s probably part of why your works have always resonated with me so much because they feel so very different compositionally from a lot of creative writing I read. There’s a conversation happening that feels embedded into the very composition of the writing itself. How do relationships inform your writing? 

I think relationships are key. I think they are an absolute must for me. At this point in my life, and I’m going to say something to you as someone who’s 57 years old and I think I can say this now: the life of the writer and the artist is very isolating and very lonely. In many ways, even now, as I move through the world doing these presentations, it feels very lonely. What sustains me are the relationships.

The relationships that are built in and last through time. My four students who showed up at my reading. I don’t think they understood the magnitude of their presence in that space, but it was profound to me. To see them and to reconnect with them. Damon Potter and I wrote two books together. He does not consider himself to be a writer at this point in his life. He wrote two books, and he said, “I’m done.” But my relationship with Damon has extended way beyond the consideration of those two writing projects. We are present with each other and it’s a huge thing to have that sense of community as a writer. 

So often I feel like I’m trying to write myself out of isolation and back into life. That happens because of the people I make these relationships with, and it happens because I find ways to collaborate. Sometimes it manifests as actual writing on a page, but other times it is just being in the presence of others and being able to share that endeavor with them. It’s so important. Relationships are everything because in some ways it saves me, as a writer, an artist, but most importantly, as a human being.

Interview Posted: November 10, 2026