In-Store: Hieu Minh Nguyen: Staying Still w/ Madeleine Cravens

"It is nothing short of a gift to be ruined again and again by the work of a once-in-a-lifetime writer." —Olivia Gatwood
About this Event

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/jdh4IymKwKU
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

Stegner and NEA Fellow Hieu Minh Nguyen’s visionary poetry collection about generational loneliness, desire, and longing.

"I am in the passenger seat heading wherever this poet wants to take me.” —Danez Smith

The highly anticipated follow-up to the award-winning poetry collection Not Here, Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Staying Still centers on the question of how: How do our anxieties around the idea of belonging estrange us from the very world we seek to belong in? How impossible does it feel to stay still and face ourselves? From the intimate longing of queer boyhood to the collective expectations imposed upon children of refugees, these poems face head-on the rejections, grief, and violence we fear in fractured family dynamics, love, and desire as we search for our place in this world.

Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of the poetry collections, Staying Still (Tin House) This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), which won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle. His honors include the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a McKnight Writing Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. Hieu is a graduate from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Originally from the Twin Cities, Hieu lives in Oakland, California.

Madeleine Cravens is a writer from Brooklyn. She has received fellowships from Stanford University, Columbia University, Macdowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her debut collection of poetry, Pleasure Principle, was published by Scribner in 2024. She is currently a doctoral student in English at the CUNY graduate center.