Writer to Writer: Verses, Voices, and Fatherhood with Bao Phi and Douglas Kearney
Douglas Kearney and Bao Phi will talk about how a chance meeting at a small poetry reading in a club in Downtown Minneapolis turned into freestyle rap emails, parallel but divergent careers in literature, and melding their lives to adapt to being fathers of color in America. Which is a fancy way of saying that two word nerds whose friendship spans across nearly three decades will talk about art, life, and random subjects that tickle their fancy.
*This is an online event*
Bao Phi is a Vietnamese American refugee, a Minnesotan, spoken word artist, poet, children’s book author, and single co-parent father. He has authored two poetry collections, Song I Sing and Thousand Star Hotel, and five picture books, including A Different Pond, which was named one of the best books of the quarter century by Kirkus Reviews, and, most recently, Ride / Đ p Xe. He was on the editorial team of the AANHPI poetry anthology, We The Gathered Heat. His work is anthologized in collections such as A Good Time for the Truth, Octavia’s Brood, and a special 2025 issue of McSweeney’s. Among the recognitions he’s received are multiple City Pages and Star Tribune Artist of the Year awards, a Caldecott Honor, the Charlotte Zolotow Award for Outstanding Writing in a Picture Book, and the 2024 Kay Sexton Award. His fifth children’s book is forthcoming from Capstone in fall of 2026, and his first book of creative prose is forthcoming from Coffeehouse Press in winter of 2027.
Douglas Kearney is a poet, essayist and librettist. His newest book, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always won the NYPL Best Book of 2025, a Minnesota Book Award, and was a 2026 Pulitzer Prize finalist (poetry). In 2023, Optic Subwoof won the Pegasus Prize for Poetry Criticism (Poetry Foundation) and the CLMP Firecracker Award for CNF. His seventh, Sho, won a Griffin Poetry Prize and an MN Book Award. Kearney won OPERA America’s Campbell Opera Librettist Prize. His five operas include Sweet Land (Music Critics of NA Best Opera of 2021), and The Comet / Poppea, a 2025 Pulitzer finalist (music) and a New York Times selection for best Classical Music of 2025. Kearney is a Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships including Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and The McKnight Foundation. Kearney is a Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and a Distinguished McKnight Professor of English at the University of Minnesota –Twin Cities.