The daughter of Vietnam War refugees, Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), a Finalist for the National Book Award, a 2025 NPR Books We Love Selection, and Electric Literature’s Best Poetry Collections of 2025; Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies; the co-author of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. She teaches as Core Faculty in Poetry at the low residency M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and works as Executive Director at Kundiman. She lives in New York City.
During her residency at MacDowell, she worked on her manuscript of poems detailing her parents' experiences as Vietnamese refugees playing extras in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.
