Hai-Dang Phan, born in Vietnam and raised in Wisconsin, is a poet, translator, and scholar who teaches courses in Ethnic American Literature and Creative Writing at Grinnell. His research interests include modern and contemporary American literature, race in American literature, war literature, reconciliation, modern and contemporary poetry in English, and translation studies. A former Thomas J. Watson Fellow, he received his B.A. in English from Grinnell College and his Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is completing his M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Florida.
His poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in literary journals such as Anomalous, Asymptote, Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, Kartika Review, Lana Turner, NOÖ Journal, and RHINO. He has interned at Harper’s Magazine, and for five years co-curated FELIX, a quarterly series of new writing based in Madison. He is currently working on a number of critical and creative projects: a book manuscript entitled A Rumor of Redress: Literature, the Vietnam War, and the Politics of Reconciliation, a book-length translation of new and selected poems by the contemporary Vietnamese poet Phan Nhien Hao, and a collection of poetry tentatively entitled Small Wars.
