Jennifer Thuy Vi Nguyen is a queer Vietnamese American writer currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes about assimilation, belonging, and power—who has it, who doesn’t, who needs it, and who hoards it. Despite the serious themes of her work, Nguyen writes creative nonfiction with a subversive, humorist lens, splicing essays with jest and hand-drawn graphics—a narrative tactic that interrogates the absurdity of power structures.
Her work has been supported by Tin House, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, The Vermont Studio Center, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, where she received the Emerge Editorial Fellowship and edited Emerge, the retreat’s anthology. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a “Notable” selection in The Best American Essays 2024, and has appeared in Longreads, The Offing, Foglifter, among others.
Nguyen has more than a decade of experience in education, supporting students at every level of the education system. She is currently the director at a private philanthropic foundation in San Francisco. Her writing and speaking—premised on how foundations should let go of power and argues for its eventual abolishment—have appeared in Alliance Magazine, Next City, and Designing Tomorrow. She is the writer and creator of “Philanthropy Confidential“—a “Dear Abby” inspired column—which solicits and answers anonymous questions from the philanthropic field.
A proud native Houstonian, she holds degrees in English from Georgetown University.