Steven Duong is the author of At the End of the World There Is a Pond, a debut poetry collection published by W. W. Norton. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Guernica, and the Yale Review, among other publications. His short fiction is featured in Catapult, The Drift, and The Best American Short Stories 2024.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Academy of American Poets, he is currently a creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University.

He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Selected WRITING

Poetry

“Companion” - The Yale Review
“Novel” - The Atlantic
“Ordnance” - Guernica
“Curfew” - Protean Magazine
“Origin Story” - Catapult

Prose

“Dorchester” - The Drift
“My Best Friend is a Fish!” - Astra Magazine
“How to Write a Poem Called ‘Ho Chi Minh City’”
- New England Review

PRAISE FOR AT THE END Of the world there is a pond

“These poems wiggle and wink within the very forms they’ve inhabited and mastered, never haute nor cliché. In Duong’s odes, sonnets, incantations, and lyrics, we find hauntings without stagnation, cyclicality without repetition. Form is holy, form is dirty, form should free us. At times, Duong’s verses can feel so nimble that they seem to jailbreak from their forms altogether.”

Los Angeles Review of Books


“Duong’s debut signals a new direction for Asian American poetry—one that is neither purely personal nor solely political, but lives at the intersection, harnessing complexity in pursuit of new forms of hope and resilience. His mastery of formal experimentation, combined with a keen cultural and ecological awareness, marks Duong as a poet of rigor and insight.”

The Adroit Journal

“One pole of Duong’s artistry is uncontainable abandon… The other pole is a painstaking formalism, a commitment to steadfastness and sobriety, as in his sonnets, which boast tattoo-precise lines and the willful sturdiness of gravestones…”

Literary Hub


“Love and death, suffering and addiction, family and displacement, all become interwoven into a commentary on the present intractable mess. Duong’s poetry assesses the situation with a jaundiced eye, yet his perspective also includes a stubborn hopefulness. His masterful debut collection leaves a curiosity to see more from this young promising poet.”

New York Journal of Books


“Steven Duong’s debut collection, At the End of the World There Is a Pond, contains poems in which wit rubs up against bleak reality. And somehow that feels like a chance for survival in a world riven by war, racism and environmental destruction. In a piece called ‘Even in Times of Global Panic I Am a Narcissist,’ he writes, ‘I send lovely but uncomforting texts.’ I believe him.”

The Washington Post Book Club