SF poet Truong Tran on necessary anger and forging connections – Local News Matters

SF poet Truong Tran on necessary anger and forging connections  Local News Matters

San Francisco poet and professor Truong Tran contains multitudes. “I’m gay, I’m Vietnamese, I’m the son of immigrant parents, I’m a teacher, I’m a Don't miss out on Bay Area news, delivered to your inbox twice a week. Tran’s vocations and self-claimed labels surely bind him to several unique and complex communities, yet his chosen identity is a simple one. “Human being. I think there’s a lot of us here, trying to find connection,” he says. Tran’s work is about living. His ninth book, “How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir” (City Lights, 240 pages, Oct. 20, 2026), which he launches this week at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, is a candid series of pieces on personal and professional encounters with racism, heterosexism and neurodivergence.

At once a reckoning with those facts of American life and his feelings about it, the writing has served to offload shames he’s carried, though not necessarily of his own volition. “Somewhere in these stories of past and otherness, there is the story of wanting and belonging,” he writes. “I am still wanting to belong to a world that is still wanting to be better than what it was and what it is.” “When something like racism happens, it’s put on you and you carry it,” he says. “It took me a long time to