Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood '17 Launches Neon Door, a Virtual Literary Exhibition

Alumna Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood '17, the founder of Neon Door, recently launched the site's first immersive literary exhibition. The website is now live at this link.

Hosted digitally on an interactive platform, Neon Door is an exhibition space featuring work across multiple genres including poetry, prose, art, audiovisual pieces, music, comics, and epistolary works. Readers click through the website as a way to navigate from each "planet" of work to the next.

Neon Door's first exhibition is titled Exhibit Nudity and features work by 36 different artists, including layered collage poems by writer Despy Boutris, a comic by artist and writer Kieran Teare-Thomas inspired by fragments of Sappho's poetry, and a visual poem by artist Jeané D. Ridges.

The name "Neon Door" is derived from Rosewood's favorite childhood manga, Doraemon, in which a magic pink door can transport anyone anywhere, as long as they can imagine the other side. Rosewood writes in the welcome letter to the exhibition, "I didn’t only want to build a literary magazine, but a space more immersive with 3-D like features, somewhere you can really enter."

Neon Door was recently nominated for a digital award by Awwwards, an organization that recognizes the talent and effort of the best global web designers and developers.

Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood is a Vietnamese American author. Her debut novel If I Had Two Lives is out from Europa Editions. Her second novel Constellations of Eve is forthcoming from DVAN/TTUP in 2022, a publishing series founded by Isabella Thuy Pelaud and Pulitzer winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen. Her short fiction and essays can be found at Salon, Lit Hub, Electric Lit, Catapult, and BOMB, among others. She lives in New York with her husband, their dog, and three cats.