Quan Barry

Born in Saigon, Vietnamese poet and novelist Quan Barry was raised on the North Shore of Boston. She earned a BA from the University of Virginia and an MFA from the University of Michigan. Barry is the author of the poetry collections Asylum (2001), Controvertibles (2004), Water Puppets (2011), and Loose Strife (2015). She also wrote the novels She Weeps Each Time You’re Born (2015) and We Ride Upon Sticks (2020), for which she won an Alex Award from the American Library Association. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Missouri Review, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rigoberto González noted, “Quan Barry’s poetry outlines a sustained meditation on violence, though she has cultivated quite an expansive territory by locating violence not only in the timelines of personal and world history, but also in representation, in literature and film. … She gives herself permission to participate in the narrative, admitting, in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way, how obsessed she is with violence.”

Barry received an Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Wallace Stegner program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.