“All the Flowers Kneeling,” the debut collection by Paul Tran, a senior poetry fellow in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will be published by Penguin Books as part of the Penguin Poets Series.
Launched in 1993, the series supports a broad range of contemporary poets, with an emphasis on formal innovation, diverse voices and perspectives, technical grace, and emotional heft. According to the publisher, “All the Flowers Kneeling” catalogs “the emotional and psychological transformation of a queer and trans descendant of Vietnamese refugees as they reassemble a fragmented self in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse.”
Tran’s work has appeared in The New Yorker and Poetry magazine, among many others. In 2017, they became the first Asian American to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam in more than two decades. In 2019, Chancellor Andrew D. Martin invited Tran to deliver a new work at Martin’s inauguration.
