2025 Welcome Read: Poet Kimberly Nguyễn - Creative Writing Open Mic for All

Normally, the English Department’s Welcome Read events have poets or authors come to Queensborough to share their stories and/or inspire our students.

This year’s finale, however, had a twist: the students were the poets.

Organized by Beth Counihan, Ilse Schrynemakers and Alison Cimino; and sponsored by the Kupferberg Holocaust Center, Creative Writing Club, and Humanities Academy, the Welcome Read 2025 finale on Oct. 8 saw the birth of a few dozen new poets thanks to the tutelage of poet and Emerging Voices Fellow Kimberly Nguyễn.

Students were taught the art of the American Sonnet — 14-line poems that express the poet’s complicated love towards something; then after an example from Nguyen starring Moo Moo (the cow from Mario Kart World), students were tasked with authoring a sonnet of their own.

And, as always, our students rose to the challenge.

From their challenges with Patois (an English-based creole language spoken in Jamaica) to their tumultuous relationship with New York City, the student’s sonnets revealed a range of concerns, experiences, etc. that — as always — highlighted our community’s diversity.

Coincidentally, Nguyễn was the perfect person for this role.

Much like how the students didn’t foresee themselves becoming poets, she didn’t foresee herself becoming one either — or at least one of any acclaim.

A recent Vassar graduate and now an entry-level employee in the financial sector in 2019, Nguyễn compiled the poems she wrote for her senior thesis into a single collection and self-published it on Amazon. Originally, these were intended for just her friends and family, but then the pandemic happened.

“People had nothing better to do than to buy my senior thesis on Amazon,” Nguyễn recalled. “Then people read it, and I got a lot of DMs about how they really connected to it. So, I thought ‘Maybe I’m really good at this and decided to keep writing and keep trying to get published.”

This eventually led to her becoming an Emerging Voices Fellow and using that experience to publish her first “real” book of poetry, but it wasn’t until 2023 when she made headlines over pay disparities at her then-employer, Citigroup, that she truly hit the big leagues.

“I made a snarky tweet about [my pay], and at the time I only had about 2,000 followers who were all poets and nerds, and I thought they were just going to pat me on the head. Fortunately, the internet got second-hand upset for me, my tweet went super viral, and the Associated Press said they were going to call my job for a comment.”

This episode resulted in people who heard about the story, “pity buying” Nguyen’s book, which not only caused it to jump in the rankings, but it also encouraged people to invite her to various events and even allowed her to complete an international book tour.

Now a UX Writer at Facebook and renowned poet, Nguyễn doesn’t look back too fondly at her time in finance (she allegedly cried during her time at JP Morgan), but she finds it hard to complain when she now gets to give lectures at places like Queensborough.

And those lectures will surely be put to good use.

Those sonnets the students worked on? Those weren’t purely for a one-off topical exercise — they were also a clever tie-in to Collective, Queensborough’s student-run literary journal, as students had the option to take the poetry they wrote during this event to the Creative Writing Club (which coincidentally met immediately after), and submit it for inclusion in this year’s issue.

Of course, it doesn’t have to go that far.

After all, Welcome Read is about sparking a genuine interest in literature. If students leave with a curiosity about poetry and a desire to examine texts more critically, then that’s a plus.