On Tuesday, Oct. 21, the Pomona College English department hosted acclaimed feminist and experimental writers and poets Hoa Nguyen, Renee Gladman and Eileen Myles. Students gathered at the Ena Thompson Reading Room in Crookshank Hall to listen to the three writers share various poems and excerpts from their work. The event was followed by a reception in Dom’s Lounge.
Each writer was introduced to the audience by students in Pomona English Professor Prageeta Sharma’s Advanced Poetry and Feminist Avant-Garde Writing classes. The event opened with Hoa Nguyen, who was introduced by Jee-In Kwon HM ’26.
Kwon began by mentioning Nguyen’s various accomplishments and describing her work as “hold[ing] love and lineage in the same breath” and being “both political and playful, [displaying] how intimacy and resistance often share the same sentence.”
Nguyen is a mixed-race Vietnamese writer, educator and editor known for her diasporic poetry surrounding themes of loss, displacement, resistance, language and memories of her mother. The first to read for the event, she stepped up to the podium and recited several poems from her most recent collection, “A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure” (2021).
Members of the audience leaned in from their seats in anticipation, drawn by her raw yet delicate command of language.
“At its heart, [“A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure”] is a story of Nguyen’s mother, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-women’s Vietnamese circus troupe, which weaves into larger questions of inheritance, war and womanhood,” Kwon said in her introduction. “The poems resist closure, opening instead to a meaningful space between starts.”
Following Nguyen’s reading was Gladman, who was introduced by Phoebe Schwab SC ’29 and Louisa Chiriboga SC ’29. Gladman is a poet, novelist and artist known for exploring the intersections of feminism, autonomy, somatics and structure in her work. As she introduced Gladman, Chiriboga emphasized how Gladman’s work explores underrepresented themes of intimacy and non-conformity from a Black queer feminist perspective.
As Gladman rose to speak, she mentioned her long-standing friendship with Nguyen and Myles, noting that despite having known them for a long time, she had yet to read with them before.
“I don’t think I’ve read with you two before,” Gladman said, gesturing to Nguyen and Myles. “I’ve read with Eileen, [but not with] the three of us together. It’s a really interesting, exciting combination, so I’m very happy to be here.”
Gladman continued the reading with a prose piece she had created earlier in her writing life, “(Untitled) Environments,” a meditation on the convergence of her writing and drawing practices — of her fascination with lines, crossings, thresholds and geographies. This was followed by a reading of a second, shorter piece, titled “Can We Be Alive?”
Audience members found solace and intrigue in her ruminative language, as well as humor in her engagement with the audience.
“All my work has some element of dislocation or translation or whatever, so writing is this kind of process of going back and forth between knowing and not knowing and creating a kind of porosity,” Gladman said. “So that there’s non-knowing in the knowing and knowing in the not-knowing.”
Wrapping up the event was a reading by Myles, a transgender nonbinary poet, novelist and art journalist known for their themes of transfixation and writing of the quotidian — everyday occurrences and emotions. They have authored over twenty books spanning genres and media, including their most recent poetry collection, “A Working Life” (2023).
Myles was introduced by Lena Bagley SC ’26, who described Myles’ work as a meaningful rumination on the everyday.
“Myles not only captures the moment, but inspects it with a brilliant light,” Bagley said. “‘A Working Life,’ their latest collection, captures all kinds of these enlightened, unenlightened moments. Mornings, everyday coffee, everyday dread … It’s the conversation between friends that ebbs and flows, and only afterwards do you wish you could have stayed inside a little longer.”
In addition to reading several of their own poems, Myles read a poem by Palestinian poet Batool Abu Akleen — titled “The Ice Cream Van” — as an ode to Akleen’s work and the continuing violence in Gaza.
Myles finished the reading with their short piece, “Feeder,” which ended with the line, “survival is my art, a violent act it is.” As Myles left the podium and took their seat, audience members clapped, struck by their moving last line and ability to command the room with their unique movements and speech.
Jeremy Kim PZ ’26, an attendee of the event, described Myles as the writer who left the most lasting impression on him.
“Eileen Myles … the way they read their poems was so full of motion and intonations,” Kim said. “Their poems were genuine and frank, but at the same time they were lyrical.”
Though Nguyen, Gladman and Myles all possess strikingly distinct styles, voices and flair, each succeeded in resonating with the audience.
“[The writers] honor the themes of love, of staying inside the hard political dimension of visibility amidst the oppressive forces of violence and erasure of honoring ancestors and influences and the poets and writers they and we love,” Sharma said.
The event closed with a buffet dinner at Dom’s Lounge, where students, faculty and other attendees had the opportunity to converse with one another as well as writers Nguyen, Gladman and Myles in an informal setting.
Kristen Wang PO ’26 described her appreciation for the event as an immersive opportunity to engage in literature outside of the classroom.
“We had learned about these writers’ works [in class], and meeting them and attending their readings really added a rich dimension to our learning,” Wang said. “I was curious about the poets’ intentions, thought processes for writing the poems and the collections they prepared for us. The poetry was all so captivating, and as a budding poet myself, it was interesting to see the behind-the-scenes of their process and what inspires them.”
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