Cathy Linh Che

Cathy Linh Che

Summary

Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, the co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books).

Her writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, McSweeney’s, Best American Poetry, and Poetry magazine. She has received awards from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Tin House, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She has taught at the 92nd Street Y, New York University, Fordham University, Sierra Nevada College, and the Polytechnic University at NYU, and she was Sierra Nevada College’s Distinguished Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence.

She is working on a poetry manuscript, a creative nonfiction manuscript, a video installation, and a short documentary on her parents’ experiences as refugees who played extras on Apocalypse Now. The video installation is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY and will be showing from October 2023 – January 2024.

She serves as Executive Director at Kundiman, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing writers and readers of Asian American literature.

Author Photo by Jess X. Snow.

Education

  • B.A. in English at Reed College
  • MFA in Creative Writing at New York University