We’re so proud of Duy Doan (Poetry ’10), who recently won the Yale Younger Poets Prize! You can read a feature about Duy in the Boston Globe here.
Carl Phillips, critically acclaimed poet and judge of the competition, says, “If games figure in Duy Doan’s We Play a Game, they do so much more seriously, and resonantly, than the title alone suggests. For game here can mean as well the strategies for weathering those parts of society that threaten identity itself, at the level of gender (in all its fluidity), or race, of family as history and tradition – of language, too, and our expectations for it. Wide-ranging in subject, Doan’s poems include boxing, tongue twisters, hedgehogs, Billie Holiday, soccer and, hardly least of all, a Vietnamese heritage that butts up against an American upbringing in ways at once comic, estranging, off-kiltering. Doan negotiates the distance between surviving and thriving, and offers here his own form of meditation on, ultimately, childhood, history, culture – who we are, and how – refusing all along to romanticize any of it.”
We Play a Game will be published by Yale University Press in April 2018. Congratulations, Duy!
Duy Doan is a Vietnamese American poet from Texas. A Kundiman fellow, he received his MFA in poetry from Boston University. His poems have appeared in Slate, The Cortland Review, Best Emerging Poets: Stay Thirsty Magazine, Amethyst Arsenic, and elsewhere. Duy has taught at Boston University, Lesley University, and the Boston Conservatory. He is the director of the Favorite Poem Project, which celebrates the role of poetry in the lives of Americans. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
