Eric Nguyen!

When we sit down to plan each year’s program we always try and strike a balance between well-established authors and exciting fresh talent whose careers are just beginning. Few novelists of recent years have enjoyed such an impressive debut as Eric Nguyen, whose extraordinary 2021 book, Things We Lost to the Water, is a captivating novel about an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans and struggles to remain connected to one another as their lives are inextricably reshaped. The New York Times Book Review described this stunning debut as "vast in scale and ambition, while luscious and inviting … in its intimacy.” It was on Barack Obama’s list of favorite books of the year, and none other than this year’s keynote speaker, Viet Thanh Nguyen, had this to say: “Eric Nguyen’s powerful novel ripples and gleams with the unpredictable flow and surge of love, which, like water, can drown us or sustain us. From a war to a hurricane, from an ocean to a flood, Things We Lost to the Water proves itself to be a novel that sustains us.”

Eric Nguyen earned an MFA in Creative Writing from McNeese State University in Louisiana. He has been awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary, Voices of Our Nation Arts (VONA), and the Tin House Writers Workshop. He is the editor in chief of diaCRITICS. He lives in Washington, DC. Things We Lost to the Water is his first novel.