Mai-Linh Hong is a Vietnamese American refugee poet and literary scholar. Her debut poetry collection, Continental Drift, won the 2025 Trio Award and will be published by Trio House Press in July 2026. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Waxwing, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Wildness, The Maine Review, and elsewhere. She publishes essays on Asian American and refugee literature in scholarly journals and anthologies. A lifelong crafter, she is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021). She teaches at the University of California, Merced.

POETRY

"American Sonnet Upon Finding an Old Report Card" and "American Sonnet Whenever [Gaza/Afghanistan/Vietnam/etc.] Gets Called a Land of Bombs"

By MAI-LINH HONG

My toenails churned the dirt, searching for Earth’s weak spots: / places to root.