Welcome! We’re excited to have you as the Volume 29 Contributing Editor for Poetry. Your poem, “I the Body of Laos and All My UXOs” appeared in Vol. 19 of Water~Stone Review back in 2016.  Since then you have had a ton of publishing success publishing three collections with Graywolf Press. Congratulations! 

Thank you! It’s my pleasure to serve as a contributing editor. I love Water~Stone Review and I remember feeling thrilled at the acceptance of that poem. It’s hard to believe that was a decade ago! I have such fondness for journals like Water~Stone Review that took a chance on my work before I even had any books.

In addition to poetry, you also write and publish essays. What draws you to write in each of these genres?  What attracts you to each?

While I stick mostly to poetry, I’ve also written essays and recently published my first piece of fiction. I think I’m drawn to prose when I want to write something that lets me linger in the language as I attempt to spell out a particular thought or idea, however realized or unrealized it may be. I never can tell where my prose will go as nothing ever feels certain. I’m always changing my mind and working through transmutations of lines into sentences, stanzas into paragraphs.

With poetry, it’s somewhat similar. I might come to a poem with a sound or a word or an image, but I can never predict where the language will take me. I think I will always love the poem more because I prefer the linguistic surrender that feels so inherent to the act of writing poetry. It involves letting go of control and allowing myself to fall through the ruptures of language. Something about that just feels more honest.

What are the themes and topics you find yourself returning to in your writing? What are your obsessions?

I find myself returning to themes of exile, war, and refugee displacement in connection to the lasting and destructive repercussions of empires past and present. I write about being Hmong and about the tragic human and environmental outcomes of war as it relates to the Hmong experience of being forced to serve as proxy soldiers for the CIA during the US war in Vietnam. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop writing about that. But I also love writing about the natural world, whether it’s the oceans or the heavens or the land in between. I think a lot, too, about the growing fragility of our world’s climate.  

As an editor, what draws you to a piece of writing? Is there a particular lens you read through? What makes a piece stand out?

I love poems that ultimately surprise me, poems that are unafraid to leap in their own wild, miraculous, and spontaneous ways. Maybe there’s something happening in the varied syntax of the lines or in the distortion of details. Maybe the poem is visually or stanzaically structured in a way that encourages me to investigate. Maybe the poem is prodding at a deeper truth about something happening or that has happened in the world. Or maybe the poem is pushing through a wall of uncertainty while coming to terms with the continued questions ahead. I also love poems that experiment with sound and musicality, poems that invent their own rhythm, and poems that teach me to rethink language. I’m open to it all! 

What will you be looking for in the poetry submitted to Volume 29 of Water~Stone Review?

To the submitters out there, I would love to see everything – poems you’re proud of, poems you hold close, poems you loathe, poems that have been rejected, poems that amplify the rage of our time, poems that speak to who you are as a poet and what you love about the craft. Revise your poems. Give me your very best. Throw in a few you’re skeptical of. I’m excited to read your work!

Current favorite poets?

My list is always growing, but I’m currently enjoying the work of Jake Skeets, Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, Mai-Linh Hong, and Gbenga Adesina, to name a few.

What writing project are you currently working on?

I’m all over the place with multiple projects floating around in my head and scattered on my desk. At the moment, I’m experimenting with some new poems that practice concision on the page and in the line. I’m a bit excited to throw myself into another documentary poetry project. And I’ve been trying my hand at short stories while testing my language in ways that feel new, different, and somewhat uncomfortable. I get bored easily so I love a good challenge when it comes to what I can produce as a writer. I’m grateful to be at a place in my work, however brief it may be, where I can play and experiment without deadlines or defined outcomes. Here’s to the possibilities ahead!

Mai Der Vang is the author of Primordial (Graywolf Press, 2025), Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017). Her honors include the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets, among others. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State and recently served as the Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University.

Welcome! We’re excited to have you as the Volume 29 Contributing Editor for Poetry. Your poem, “I the Body of Laos and All My UXOs” appeared in Vol. 19 of Water~Stone Review back in 2016.  Since then you have had a ton of publishing success publishing three collections with Graywolf Press. Congratulations! 

Thank you! It’s my pleasure to serve as a contributing editor. I love Water~Stone Review and I remember feeling thrilled at the acceptance of that poem. It’s hard to believe that was a decade ago! I have such fondness for journals like Water~Stone Review that took a chance on my work before I even had any books.

In addition to poetry, you also write and publish essays. What draws you to write in each of these genres?  What attracts you to each?

While I stick mostly to poetry, I’ve also written essays and recently published my first piece of fiction. I think I’m drawn to prose when I want to write something that lets me linger in the language as I attempt to spell out a particular thought or idea, however realized or unrealized it may be. I never can tell where my prose will go as nothing ever feels certain. I’m always changing my mind and working through transmutations of lines into sentences, stanzas into paragraphs.

With poetry, it’s somewhat similar. I might come to a poem with a sound or a word or an image, but I can never predict where the language will take me. I think I will always love the poem more because I prefer the linguistic surrender that feels so inherent to the act of writing poetry. It involves letting go of control and allowing myself to fall through the ruptures of language. Something about that just feels more honest.

What are the themes and topics you find yourself returning to in your writing? What are your obsessions?

I find myself returning to themes of exile, war, and refugee displacement in connection to the lasting and destructive repercussions of empires past and present. I write about being Hmong and about the tragic human and environmental outcomes of war as it relates to the Hmong experience of being forced to serve as proxy soldiers for the CIA during the US war in Vietnam. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop writing about that. But I also love writing about the natural world, whether it’s the oceans or the heavens or the land in between. I think a lot, too, about the growing fragility of our world’s climate.  

As an editor, what draws you to a piece of writing? Is there a particular lens you read through? What makes a piece stand out?

I love poems that ultimately surprise me, poems that are unafraid to leap in their own wild, miraculous, and spontaneous ways. Maybe there’s something happening in the varied syntax of the lines or in the distortion of details. Maybe the poem is visually or stanzaically structured in a way that encourages me to investigate. Maybe the poem is prodding at a deeper truth about something happening or that has happened in the world. Or maybe the poem is pushing through a wall of uncertainty while coming to terms with the continued questions ahead. I also love poems that experiment with sound and musicality, poems that invent their own rhythm, and poems that teach me to rethink language. I’m open to it all! 

What will you be looking for in the poetry submitted to Volume 29 of Water~Stone Review?

To the submitters out there, I would love to see everything – poems you’re proud of, poems you hold close, poems you loathe, poems that have been rejected, poems that amplify the rage of our time, poems that speak to who you are as a poet and what you love about the craft. Revise your poems. Give me your very best. Throw in a few you’re skeptical of. I’m excited to read your work!

Current favorite poets?

My list is always growing, but I’m currently enjoying the work of Jake Skeets, Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, Mai-Linh Hong, and Gbenga Adesina, to name a few.

What writing project are you currently working on?

I’m all over the place with multiple projects floating around in my head and scattered on my desk. At the moment, I’m experimenting with some new poems that practice concision on the page and in the line. I’m a bit excited to throw myself into another documentary poetry project. And I’ve been trying my hand at short stories while testing my language in ways that feel new, different, and somewhat uncomfortable. I get bored easily so I love a good challenge when it comes to what I can produce as a writer. I’m grateful to be at a place in my work, however brief it may be, where I can play and experiment without deadlines or defined outcomes. Here’s to the possibilities ahead!

Bio: Mai Der Vang is the author of Primordial (Graywolf Press, 2025), Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017). Her honors include the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets, among others. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State and recently served as the Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University.