FULL INTERVIEW: Continental Drift
An interview with Mai-Linh Hong by Leona Sevick
Mai-Linh Hong’s debut poetry collection, Continental Drift, won the 2025 Trio Award and will be published by Trio House Press in July 2026. She has been a Voices of Our Nation Fellow, Tin House Scholar, and Susanna Colloredo Fellow in Environmental Writing at the Vermont Studio Center. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, American Association of University Women, Institute for Citizens & Scholars, and more.
Dr. Hong’s research on Asian American and refugee literatures can be found in Amerasia Journal, Verge, MELUS, and other journals and edited volumes. A lifelong crafter and sewist, Dr. Hong is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021).
Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Waxwing, The Offing, and numerous other journals and in They Rise Like a Wave: Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2022). She was a finalist for the Test Site Poetry Series, the Graybeal-Gowen Prize, and Best of the Net, and a runner-up in the Hayden’s Ferry Review Poetry Contest.
Leona Sevick: You were trained as a literary scholar and you also earned a JD, but have you always written poetry? And how has your poetry been informed by your training and teaching as a literary scholar?
Mai-Linh Hong: Yes, thanks for that question. I mean, I make jokes about how often I returned to school, but you know, it all comes together at some point. I have written poetry, actually, since I was a child. I would say I have not viewed poetry as part of my professional profile, until very recently. These fields or disciplines, literary studies and law, they’re called disciplines for a reason. They discipline you into certain ways of thinking and writing. On one hand, both fields exposed me to a wide range of other writers, and that has been, in a way, my training in creative writing, just being exposed to so many different writers, and as a teacher as well, reading and teaching so much poetry over the years. But on the other hand, it can impede your creative process. Interestingly, in the last few years, I did have a chance to step away from research for a bit. I had a fellowship for a year, and then, as life does, life threw some curve balls at me, and I had a period of medical leave where I wasn’t able to do my research. But this actually made space for me to go back to an earlier version of myself as a thinker and as a creator, and that’s when I started writing poetry in a more concentrated way. I started thinking of it as a project and not just as a private practice that I did for myself and maybe read to a few friends, but didn’t, you know, put out there in the world. Most of this book was written within a period of about six months. Yeah, it is intense. And I think it took a lot of months of clearing my mind before that could happen. So on one hand, I think the literary studies training can be really good training as a poet, but on the other hand, you have to turn off that critical voice. I’d be curious at some point to hear about your training….
LS: Yeah. My training has been similar. I didn’t go to law school, though. I don’t have that, but I started writing very late, so that wasn’t something that was really part of my life for a long time, but once it was, I didn’t turn back.
MH: Yeah, there’s been a joy in returning to an earlier, more creative part of myself.
LS: That’s great. And boy, you had a lot of productivity in a very concentrated amount of time. And that’s a gift! And you’d had much success with this book. Congratulations!
MH: Thank you.
LS: I wanted to ask you about the poems that engage the Vietnam War and your experience as a child refugee. As a result, the perspective or point of view of the child occurs often in your work. Can you talk a little bit about the experience of writing from that viewpoint?
MH: I’ve had time and space to consider my own upbringing in the last several years, in conjunction with raising my son, who is nine. He was very young during Covid, for example, which was a time when I think a lot of people got introspective, not having the same external social relations that they usually had. For myself as well, it was a time to reflect on who I am as a parent. And that led me to think a lot more about my childhood. And so it makes sense to me that these poems came after that period.
It’s also interesting when you come from a refugee background or any background that involves a lot of trauma or intergenerational memories or big experiences to contend with. It’s almost like you have to deal with that before you can get to other topics. You know, I talked to other writers who are Vietnamese or have similar backgrounds, and they also feel sometimes like, well, I had to write the refugee poems first before I could write the poems that are about other things. I think there’s some amount of that. And I think that part of the narrative arc of this book is moving from that place of like, what happened? Where did I come from? How did I land here? Like moving from that place, to a place of greater possibilities. And so by the end of the book, I think I’m very much in the present moment and thinking about how to live ethically as a human, you know, with the afterlife of refugee migration always informing it, of course. But I think there’s an intertwining of thinking about parenting and thinking about my own childhood. I think it comes up for a lot of folks when they have a young kid, too.
LS: I think so, yeah, we can’t help but reflect in that way. And I love that your title also reflects the sort of shift that you describe: the refugee poems and then a move into a different space. I think that’s very good.
So many of your poems pursue very personal losses. Are these poems difficult to read or to discuss publicly?
MH: Yeah, thank you for asking that. So I think grief showed up in this collection much more than I expected. And maybe that happens naturally, I don’t know. Reflecting on my family history and my childhood, the grief of growing up in a separated family—a family that had gone through involuntary migration, where branches of the family couldn’t access each other—growing up in that kind of environment became much more visible to me over the course of writing these poems. And the grief of that came out in the poems and maybe enabled me to access certain other experiences.
So I do write about my miscarriages and infertility in this collection. It’s not that I set out to do that, and I didn’t set out to write about any particular topic in this collection, but I do think that once grief was on the table, it allowed me to talk about things that had been really difficult to discuss before. I have not publicly talked about having multiple miscarriages and struggling with secondary infertility after I had my son; that’s something most of my colleagues won’t know about me, right? And it’s not something that I’ve written about in a scholarly way. I think the poems are probably my best way to talk about it at this point.
There’s one poem called “Untitled” that is very directly about my last miscarriage, which happened during the second trimester and came after we knew there was a problem with the pregnancy. We had to make difficult decisions, and it was a very, very difficult time for us as a family. In that poem, I go into some details that I don’t know if I could say in a conversation with someone, except maybe a very, very close friend. But I don’t even know if that’s the case. I think I had to give form to it in some other way, and doing this was really surprising to me, being able to write this poem. But that poem does combine the story of the miscarriage with the news story about the children in Thailand who had been trapped in a cave, the children’s soccer team…
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