"Staying Still" Book Launch with Hieu Minh Nguyen and Friends

We’re proud to host the release of Hieu Minh Nguyen’s third collection of poetry Staying Still, published by Tin House.

And there will be an amazing line-up of readers to help Hieu celebrate this milestone including: sam sax (host), Danez Smith (host), aleah bradshaw, Gretchen Carvajal, Leigh Lucas, Cornelius O, and Zeina Hashem Beck

Green Apple Books will be on site selling copies of Hieu’s book.

Join us for the afterparty across the street at Driftwood with DJ Nick Moss

*Please note we have a limited number of seats available at this venue. Registration includes an option to request seating; once seating is filled, standing room will be available.

For any additional questions, please email info@kearnystreet.org.


About Hieu Minh Nguyen

Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of the poetry collections, This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), which won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle. His honors include the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a McKnight Writing Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. Hieu is a graduate from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Originally from the Twin Cities, Hieu lives in Oakland, California. Staying Still, forthcoming from Tin House will be his third collection of poems.  

About the Book

Stegner and NEA Fellow Hieu Minh Nguyen’s visionary poetry collection about generational loneliness, desire, and longing.

“I am in the passenger seat heading wherever this poet wants to take me.” —Danez Smith


The highly anticipated follow-up to the award-winning poetry collection Not Here, Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Staying Still centers on the question of how: How do our anxieties around the idea of belonging estrange us from the very world we seek to belong in? How impossible does it feel to stay still and face ourselves? From the intimate longing of queer boyhood to the collective expectations imposed upon children of refugees, these poems face head-on the rejections, grief, and violence we fear in fractured family dynamics, love, and desire as we search for our place in this world.

“Explores queer desire, refugee inheritance, and generational loneliness in works that range between intimate memory and the forces shaping identity and longing.” Publishers Weekly, a Top Ten Most Anticipated Poetry Collection for Fall