Barbara Tran


Barbara Tran is an American-born poet living in Canada. She received a Pushcart Prize in 1997.

Career

Born in New York City, Tran received her BA from New York University and her MFA from Columbia University. She coedited the anthology Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose and guest edited Viet Nam: Beyond the Frame, a special issue of Michigan Quarterly Review.
She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Scholarship, MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize, and is featured in filmmaker Yunah Hong's documentary Between the Lines: Asian American Women's Poetry.
Her poems have appeared in the Women's Review of Books, Ploughshares, and The New Yorker, as well as in the Williams [College Museum of Art] exhibit The Moon Is Broken: Photography from Poetry, Poetry from Photography.
Tran's first poetry collection, In the Mynah Bird's Own Words, was selected by Robert Wrigley as the winner of Tupelo Press's chapbook competition, and was a PEN/Open Book Award finalist.
In fall 2015, Tran was a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook. She lives in Toronto.

Awards and honors

Tran is a recipient of a Research and Creation grant and a Professional Development for Artists grant from the Canada Council, as well as a Literary Creation Project grant from the Ontario Arts Council.
She was longlisted for the 2018 CBC Nonfiction Prize.
Precedented Parenting was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry at the 2024 Governor General's Awards.

Works