Steven Duong is a writer from San Diego, California.
He is the author of the debut poetry collection, At the End of the World There Is a Pond (W. W. Norton, 2025).
His writing appears in the American Poetry Review, The Best American Short Stories 2024, The Drift, Guernica, the New England Review, Protean Magazine, the Yale Review, and elsewhere.
The recipient of an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is currently a creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University and an editor of short fiction at Joyland Magazine.
He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
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… 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.... 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
“The fish stand in for conflicts of all sorts: familial, ecological, migratory, creative. It is a contemplation of the poet's relationship to these conflicts that drive this debut collection, in a work that is witty, declarative, probing, and a bit sad.”
New York Public Library
“Steven Duong’s debut collection… 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.”
The Washington Post Book Club
Advance praise for pond
“Duong’s poetry is surprising and alive, expansive in its treatment of longing, history, and what it means to render art from experience.”
Raven Leilani
“Duong teaches me that humor is another form of grace, that formal dexterity is nothing without emotional depth, and that love is perhaps not enough, yet still worth striving, diving, singing for.”
Chen Chen
“These poems may not always want to be in our world, but I always want to be in theirs.”
Natalie Shapero
“This is poetry from a teeming intellect deserving of our most serious attention. The velocity and music of this book will steady you far into your days.”
Major Jackson
“Winsome, finely wrought, funny, and profound, At the End of the World There Is a Pond is terrific company for the tumult of all times.”
Gabrielle Bates
SELECTED WORK
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
PRESS
Reviews & Features
“Clambering for Metaphor”
Los Angeles Review of Books
“Review: At the End of the World”
New York Journal of Books
“Listen to the Firespitters: Seven Poetry Books to Read This February”
Literary Hub
“27 new books out today.”
Literary Hub
“A Review of Steven Duong’s At the End of the World There Is a Pond”
The Adroit Journal
Interviews
“Obsessions Create Ripple Effects in ‘At the End of the World There Is a Pond’”
Electric Literature
“Steven Duong & Vivian Pham in Conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen”
Accented Podcast
listen to my mix :)))