Steven Duong is a writer from San Diego. He is the author of the debut poetry collection At the End of the World There Is a Pond (W. W. Norton, 2025). His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Guernica, and the Yale Review, among other publications, and his short fiction is featured in Catapult, The Drift, and The Best American Short Stories 2024.

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

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

“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, author of Luster

“In poems, striking, humorous, assured, Steven Duong turns and turns the world over again until we are seen anew… This is poetry from a teeming intellect deserving of our most serious attention.”

Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle

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


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


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

You can order At the End of the World There Is a Pond now from A Room of One’s Own!