Alumni Spotlight: Diana Khoi Nguyen '12
The Alumni Spotlight is a place to hear from the School of the Arts alumni community about their journeys as artists and creators.
Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen '12 is the author of the chaplet Unless (Belladonna*, 2019), and poetry collections: Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and recipient of the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery and Colorado Book Awards, and Root Fractures (Scribner, 2024). Her writing appears in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Asymptote; her video work was exhibited at the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art in 2023. A MacDowell and Kundiman fellow, as well as a member of the Vietnamese diasporic artist collective She Who Has No Master(s), Nguyen’s other honors include winning a "Discovery" Poetry Contest, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an artist-in-residence at Brown University. Currently, she teaches creative writing in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA program and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Was there a specific faculty member or peer who especially inspired you while at the School of the Arts? If so, who and how?
Lucie Brock-Broido '82, hands down. From her first phone conversation with me, inviting me to come to Columbia, to her last voicemail sent to me in the summer of 2018, months before I heard the news about her passing. During my much too brief time there, it seemed she gave her whole being to her students: every hour, every neuron, every breath. In addition to epitomizing service to students as an instructor, facilitator of creative writing, creative thinking, her emotional intelligence inspired me to see the world around me—its inhabitants, systems, and quiet wonders—as deeply and openly as possible. Her linguistic genius—shared with her students through her attentive modes of gentle inquiry, enabled me to access poetry and other creative work in ways which had been previously inaccessible to me. She taught me to see, to read—how to be. Not only as poet in this terrifying and wondrous world, but as a citizen indebted to it—for the gift of life.
What was your favorite or most memorable class while at the School of the Arts?
“The Practice of Poetry,” facilitated by Lucie Brock-Broido, which was a kind of mandatory poetry primer for all first year poetry students in the program. Each week, we all sat around the table, discussing one chapter from the voluminous reader Lucie had physically curated and assembled. The way in which she broke down parts of a poem and the process of writing, revising, and inhabiting poetry’s medium (or inviting it to inhabit us—), provided the architecture for my engagement with writing and thinking. I return to various chapters in that reader seasonally each year. It is read, reread—that reader, that class, were her hermeneutics of poetry itself.
What advice would you give to recent graduates?
Never stop writing, creating. No matter what. Make all other things in life, mold to your practice of art-making.