Diana Nguyen is a second year Hamline University student double majoring in English and Sociology. She has been writing and doing spoken word poetry since her junior year of high school. In 2018, her poem “Chapters of America” was published in Hamline’s Fulcrum literary journal and in Ctrl + F Identities, Places, Connections, the University of Minnesota’s Asian American Studies Program Journal.

Also in 2018, she competed in Minnesota’s Youth Slam Poetry competition, Be Heard, and competed nationally at Brave New Voices in Houston, Texas. She also helped create a youth campaign for Voices For Racial Justice themed around mental health in communities of color in 2017. In January 2019 she worked with Hamline’s NCORE team to put together an event focused on healing communities of color in a race intensive political climate.

A Vietnamese American woman, she is trying to balance the Vietnamese with the American in America, and is learning everyday how to utilize her gift of poetry to contribute to healing herself, and inadvertently healing the larger people of color community in the face of generational, emotional, and physical traumas.