Khaty Xiong, a Fresno native, published two poetry chapbooks, Deer Hour (New Michigan Press, 2014) and Elegies (University of Montana, 2013), before her full-length collection Poor Anima was published in 2015 by Apogee Press, establishing her as the first Hmong woman to publish a full-length poetry collection. (The first Hmong man was Pos Moua with Where the Torches are Burning in 2002 by Swan Scythe Press.)
National Book Award for Poetry winner Don Mee Choi praised Khaty: “Her language, a traumatized body, traverses between welts and wounds, between home and exile.” Since, she has received several fellowships, most recently the 2020 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship where she was one of five recipients. Khaty has been featured in many publications such as Academy of American Poets, Poetry, The New York Times, and others.
Khaty is a pioneer, paving a path in the literary world for others like her, and her accomplishments make someone like me, a fellow Hmong writer, incredibly proud.
Jer Xiong: First, I want to congratulate you again on being a fellow for the Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. When I saw you post the news on Facebook, I was so proud of you and so inspired. I’ve seen you talk about how you’ve applied for a long time now. How were you when you received the news, and what does this mean for you going forward?
Khaty Xiong: Thank you so much! I was definitely in a daze when I received the news weeks prior to the official announcement. I think my impulse was to try and celebrate, but with whom exactly? Like many folks I’ve been isolated and quarantined since March, so celebration has been hard to define. My partner knew about the fellowship and was happy for me, but we’ve been so focused on surviving this pandemic. Normally, I think the Poetry Foundation would have hosted an in-person gathering or reading in Chicago to celebrate the new fellows, but that wasn’t possible.
I guess that day kind of felt like any other day under this pandemic umbrella—unreal and lonely. Of course, there were virtual congratulatory messages from friends and loved ones. Like previous years of applying for the fellowship, the poems I had submitted for my application were grief poems. The last four years, specifically, have been grief poems about my mom’s sudden death, so that’s part of my struggle in celebrating the fellowship. It’s been a strange, bittersweet blessing to receive this kind of support.
My hope is that this fellowship will allow me to return to my second manuscript-in-progress, which has been on hold since January 2020. I had just finished my month-long residency at Vermont Studio Center from a fellowship I had received from the Ohio Arts Council. The pandemic has really forced me to look away from the project. I’m hoping to regain the spiritual energy to work on it again since this manuscript focuses on my mom’s death.
JX: You have also been a recipient of several fellowships in recent years like the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and the Roxane Gay Fellowship in Poetry. Can you talk more about what these fellowships have been able to do for you?
KX: Very simply, I would not have been able to pursue my second manuscript-in-progress had it not been for the space, time, and freedom that these fellowships granted me. Sure, I would have worked on the book, regardless of the fellowships, but time exists very differently in residency spaces since you’re not working full-time at your normal job or you’re simply not at home where there are other obligations that eat into your writing time. I’ve been very lucky that all of my fellowships have paid for travel, food, room and board. In other words, it is a huge privilege to be given uninterrupted time so that you may focus on your craft.
There has been a kind of joke amongst artists and writers on social media that this pandemic has become the “residency” they’ve always wanted, or something like that, but I think we know that hasn’t been true at all for a lot of us—many of whom are still working or teaching (from home, if possible), or lost their jobs and are struggling to make ends meet. For many, it has and will be a difficult recovery, financially and spiritually. I am privileged that I have a partner who can support me at this time, and that my puppy keeps me great company.
I look back at the fellowships I’ve held and feel like they were from a very different lifetime, since they had allowed me to travel and create space for my writing. Unlike the past fellowships, my Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship doesn’t come with a residency or anything like that; it’s an award that financially supports current and future writing projects, for which I am very grateful.
JX: You are the first Hmong American woman with a full-length poetry collection in the United States with Poor Anima in 2015. How have you changed (and not changed) as a poet since the book was published?
KX: I don’t know if I’ve ever measured the changes in my work, but I know I have changed as a poet since my debut collection. I was really discovering my voice in Poor Anima, and I think a reader can sense that in reading the book. It was my first big attempt at placing all these poems I had written about my family’s history (war and intergenerational trauma), my history with language, and more, together in one space. It was a terrifying process. I really didn’t have a lot of faith in the book (because I’m very hard on myself), but my mentor and the editors at Apogee Press clearly felt otherwise.
It was terrifying for a lot of reasons. Being a Hmong poet is one of them, but also how the book would be received by Hmong and non-Hmong communities intimidated me. Why this book? Why read it? And who cares? These were the questions I asked myself a lot (I actually still ask myself these questions). Plus, at the time, I had only recently discovered other, though few, Hmong poets and writers out there in the world. I wanted to be in conversation with them, but I was afraid I’d never amount to the work they’d done and or had already started or written—the path they had begun paving. I was aware of how small Hmong literature was—Hmong literature written by Hmong writers—so there was that added pressure and huge responsibility.
Besides, I would also be the first daughter in my family to do this. No one in my family ever imagined a poet to emerge and publish, so publishing Poor Anima and receiving fellowships since 2015 has been overwhelming for me since I’ve never been able to exactly share these successes with my family—in part because being a Hmong poet (and creating in Western spaces) is uncharted terrain for a Hmong family who is only in this country because of war and genocide; and because so much of America still isn’t aware of our history or why we are present.
Growing up, Hmong embroidery and Hmong Song Poetry weren’t just forms of art; they were forms of survival. Survival looks very different right now for Hmong families across the country, especially for those born in this country (like myself). When I was young, I had no idea that writing poetry would become my form of survival—in coping with intergenerational trauma. As lonely as it’s been to make art and to write, I don’t regret this path.
My mother’s sudden passing strangely proved this to me—that I was meant to write poetry. When one experiences profound loss, I think there’s the assumption that such loss can impact one’s creativity or ability to create. The day my mother died, I impulsively wrote a poem. It was a reaction I don’t think I expected, but my immediate concern was my mother’s spirit—the state of her spirit—did she know she had died? Was she okay? I suppose it felt like I had to write a poem because it suddenly became my only way of communicating with her. And I’ve been writing poems since her death.
A lot of things have changed me as a poet since 2015, but what these changes have ultimately revealed is that I cannot live without poetry. I need it to commune with the living, to commune with the dead, and to meet the many burdens of grief that come with being alive.
JX: In your bio, you state that you are working on your second collection and there is so much to unpack from the sound of it. I can’t wait to read it, and I am particularly curious about how you had defined it as, “This body of grief work is an ode to the inability to “return home” as a descendant of illiterate diasporans, interrogating, as well as creating, myths around mothers, death, and gardens.” As a Hmong American writer too who is continuously reckoning with our diaspora, with being stateless with no “Hmong” country, I am interested in how all these threads you’re working on are coming together. How is the manuscript transforming? What discoveries are you making in this second collection?
KX: The last time I worked on this manuscript I was just starting to organize the poems into a “book” form. I’m not so confident it’ll get there anytime soon, since I was, at the time, constantly revising and or generating new work. I have no idea what will finally “make the cut” in the book in terms of poems, as I’d written a lot between 2017 and 2020. It’s also just a very painful manuscript to look at since it largely deals with my grief over my mom’s death, and the other griefs that you inherit along the way, i.e., simply being a child of war refugees and the violence around being a survivor (survivor’s guilt).
In thinking about my recent conversations with poets Prageeta Sharma and Victoria Chang, both of whom are also writing heavily about grief, I think the discoveries I’ve made so far is that I will contend with my mother’s death for as long as I live—so long as I have memories. In our recent conversation, Victoria shared that someone had made a comment about how she’s still writing about the death of her mother. Her response to that was something like “because my mom’s still dead.” To echo this, I’ll be thinking and writing about my mother for a long time, because her death was so untimely (or timely, if you believe in fate), and because so long as my mother continues to stay dead, I’m not certain these grief poems will come to end.
To add to that, I’ve been aware of my grief changing (inevitably because of time passing). It’s not that my grief is disappearing; I don’t actually believe one’s grief ever just disappears. It’s that I am becoming more “comfortable” with my grief, and embracing (as hard as it is and has been) that this is just the timeline in which I am meant to live, in which my mother was not meant to live. But there are days when this doesn’t feel possible to accept, and I challenge my mother’s fate by asking for her forgiveness, by writing to her, by writing my way to her. And so, because of the messiness that comes with profound loss, I’ve been struggling to piece the book together, probably because the language that I have to use in this book isn’t language I normally use with the living, and other reasons. It may be some time, but I look forward to sharing it with you and the world once I’ve completed it. I just hope by the time I get there I won’t be so undone. I guess we’ll see.
JX: What are your thoughts about the future of Hmong American literature and poetry? And what are your hopes for writers like me who are just getting started?
KX: Hmong American literature and poetry will bloom. I am thinking of dear friend and poet Pos Moua, who passed away earlier this year. I still think of his kind words to me, his support for my poetry over the last few years. His poetry was very dear to me. His voice was a soft, loving, and hungry voice. In the few short years I got to know him, our conversations taught me that Hmong Americans will thrive in literature and the arts. We are storytellers after all. There are voices in our blood.
Pos, like the other few Hmong poets and writers, made it possible for me to carry that torch our ancestors couldn’t bear, a torch our ancestors could have never imagined. You are one of those writers for me. I stay moved and humbled by the work that you do, the work you continue to do for our community and communities like ours. My hope is to stay inspired by emerging Hmong voices, and to be in conversation, and that these conversations will continue long after us.
Khaty Xiong was born to Hmong refugees from Laos. She is the author of Poor Anima (Apogee Press, 2015), the first full-length collection of poetry published by a Hmong American woman in the United States. She was recently awarded a 2020 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her honors include a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council (2020), a Roxane Gay Fellowship in Poetry from Jack Jones Literary Arts (2019), the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship at MacDowell (2017), and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council (2016). Xiong’s work has been featured in the following publications: Poetry, the New York Times, How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011), Poetry Society of America and Academy of American Poets websites, and elsewhere. In 2018, her poem, “On Visiting the Franklin Park Conservatory & Botanical Gardens” was highlighted in an immersive poetry installation at the Poetry Foundation Gallery in Chicago (June–September) centering on the conversation of grief and loss. In 2019, she was awarded Best of the Net for her poem, “Year of the Cardinal’s Song (VII).”
Jer Xiong is a Hmong American writer and a MFA Nonfiction Candidate at California State University, Fresno. She’s been an editor for the Watershed Review and The Normal School. Her works have been in maivmai; (559) JOU-RNAL; Celebrate Hmong; Flies, Cockroaches, and Poets; and Pos Moua’s Karst Mountains Will Bloom. She’s a member of theHmong American Writers’ Circle (HAWC). She’s also the co-founder and president ofHmong American Ink & Stories (HAIS).