Mai Der Vang

Biography

Mai Der Vang is the 2016 Walt Whitman Award winner of the Academy of American Poets and author of Afterland (Graywolf, 2017). Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post and elsewhere. She is co-editor of How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011). She has received residencies from Hedgebrook and she is a Kundiman fellow.

See Work

POETRY / Spring 2017

Ear to the Night

By Mai Der Vang


I press my hand to your sleep.

Then I find your spent head under small
whirling tresses

having digested the clatter
of car horns, children

bustling into sweet shops.

POETRY / Spring 2017

I Shovel Into the Heart to Find Its Naked Face

By Mai Der Vang

Chambers fall to splinter gravel.
Leaf grows from my throat. 

Walls forsake the crumpled ground
It is meant to hold up.

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POETRY / Spring 2017

Calling the Lost

By Mai Der Vang

Hmong people say one’s spirit can run off,
Go into hiding underground.

Only the physical stays behind.

POETRY / Spring 2017

Heart Swathing in Late Summer

By Mai Der Vang

In the penumbra of an oak under sculpted
Moonlight, we pile the last waking hours

On our faces, breathe the wilderness of dry
Heat waiting for fall ventilations. It feels