Staying Still: Poems by Hieu Minh Nguyen

Please join us on Wednesday, September 9th to celebrate the new poetry collection . The author will be joined by Fatimah Asghar.

Please note: this is a mask required event. We have free masks available for everyone at the door, several large air purifiers, and ceiling fans for circulation.

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.

Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us, is a poet, filmmaker, educator, and performer. They are the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color. They also were a co-producer on Ms. Marvel for Disney + and wrote the episode "Time And Again." Along with Safia Elhillo, they are the editor of Halal If You Hear Me, an anthology that celebrates Muslim writers who are also women, queer, gender-nonconforming, and/or trans.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which has a wheelchair accessible entrance and bathroom. Masks are required. We have free masks available for everyone at the door, several large air purifiers, and ceiling fans for circulation. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. If you need a reserved seat, ASL interpretation, or have other access needs, please email [email protected] (2 weeks notice is required for interpretation).