Vietnamese writer, artist, activist, and educator
Thu Anh Nguyen
Thu Anh Nguyen is a Vietnamese American whose work as a poet, painter, and educator tells her immigration story. In her social practice art, Thu shapes poetry while listening to conversations about what makes a flourishing community. Thu also paints large-scale watercolors and is obsessed with flowers, their symbolism and beauty. Thu is currently on the National Staff of SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity).
The National SEED Project partners with communities, institutions, and schools to develop leaders who guide their peers in conversational communities to drive personal, institutional, and societal change toward social justice. SEED leaders design their SEED seminars with the flexibility to adapt them to their own local needs. They include personal reflection and testimony, listening to others' voices, and learning experientially and collectively, in the context of each participant’s intersecting identities. Through this methodology, SEED equips participants to connect our lives to one another and to society at large by acknowledging systems of power, oppression, and privilege.
Thu has taught English, Creative Writing, and History for almost twenty years, most recently at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. Thu Anh has led workshops and writes essays about cultural competence and literacy. She is also a published poet. Her writing has been published in Literacy Today, the Southern Humanities Review, the Cider Press Review, and the Crab Orchard Review.
Photographer, Eric Lee, explores the struggles and triumphs of Thu Nguyen and Hansel Pham as they raise two boys to understand their layered identities. See the full project at wherewerereallyfrom.com
Thu Anh Nguyen at her home in Gaithersburg, Md. Ms. Nguyen left her teaching job in November 2021. “It felt like no one was ever going to listen,” she said.
Credit: Jared Soares for The New York Tims
Thu was honored with a Writing Residency from the InnerLoop Writers Series in Washington, DC. When she is not teaching or writing, Thu Anh is also a watercolor painter and calligrapher who paints large-scale floral powers for social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name.