Mai-Linh K. Hong, JD, PhD

About ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Mai-Linh Hong's creative writing and scholarly research explore the imaginative ways refugees interact with landscape, place, community, and each other.

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Throughout her work, Dr. Hong strives to enact a refugee politics of care, an orientation towards community and social justice informed by her family's lived experience as Vietnamese refugees.   

 

Dr. Hong's scholarly writing on Asian American and refugee literatures can be found in Amerasia Journal, Verge, MELUS, and other leading journals and edited volumes. She is writing a book of experimental essays about refugee storytelling, Perilous Telling: Sojourning with Refugee Story. ​

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Dr. Hong's debut poetry collection, Continental Drift, won the 2025 Trio Award and will be published by Trio House Press in July 2026. Poems appear or are forthcoming in numerous journals and in They Rise Like a Wave: Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2022). She was a finalist for the Test Site Poetry Series and the Graybeal-Gowen Prize, and a runner-up in the Hayden's Ferry Review Poetry Contest.

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A lifelong crafter and sewist, she is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021). Through scholarly essays, art, photography, and creative writing, the book contextualizes and documents the rise of a women-of-color-led mutual aid organization that produced masks for the most vulnerable communities during the Covid-19 pandemic. 
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In 2025, Dr. Hong is a Voices of Our Nation Fellow, Tin House Scholar, and the Susanna Colloredo Fellow in Environmental Writing at the Vermont Studio Center. Her research has been supported by prestigious fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, American Association of University Women, Institute for Citizens & Scholars, and more.​​ 

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Born in Vietnam and raised in Virginia, Dr. Hong teaches literature at the University of California, Merced. ​From 2017 to 2020, she co-chaired the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies. She has also served as Co-Chair of the Asian American Feminisms Section of the Association for Asian American Studies. 

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Dr. Hong received her Ph.D. in English Language and Literature and a law degree from the University of Virginia. She also holds an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and a B.A. in Literature from Yale University. 

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Instagram: @continentaldrift_poems

Bluesky: @mai-linhhong.bsky.social​​​

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Photo credit: Falu Bakrania