Dr. Mai-Linh K. Hong | Asian American Literature Professor

Dr. Mai-Linh K. Hong is a poet and essayist and a scholar of refugee storytelling. Born in Vietnam and raised in Virginia, she teaches literature at the University of California, Merced.

Dr. Hong's debut poetry collection, Continental Drift, won the 2025 Trio Prize and will be published by Trio House Press in 2026. Poems are forthcoming or published in Copper Nickel, The Minnesota Review, ANMLY, Crab Orchard Review, Wildness, and They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2022). Essays and criticism appear in Amerasia, Verge, MELUS, The Account, and other journals and edited volumes. She is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021).

In 2025, Dr. Hong is a VONA Fellow, the Susanna Colloredo Fellow in Environmental Writing at the Vermont Studio Center, and a participant in the Elk River Writers Workshop. She has also received fellowships and grants from ACLS, AAUW, Tin House, Institute for Citizens & Scholars, and more.

Instagram: @continentaldrift_poems

Bluesky: @FleursduMai.bsky.social

Photo credit: Falu Bakrania