HOW DID YOU COME TO POETRY?

While I’d always dabbled in poetry in middle school, I was more a long-form prose person—for example, I was an avid NaNoWriMo writer (though it was a school assignment.) But there’s something fundamentally interesting about flash fiction, since every single word and stylistic choice has to fight to exist on a page. So for me, being able to write flash fiction was thrilling because it not only shared a cool story with my audience, but it did so with limited space versus a novella. After taking a short story class in high school, I started wondering about how I could express myself as concisely and cleanly as possible—after all, prose is often (but not always) bound by grammar and other limitations. That inevitably led to my interest in poetry, where those conventions are often bent or broken. At this point, I got involved with organizations like the Young Poets Network (YPN) and got to see what my peers were writing. Through YPN, I was able to explore poetry translation, which is an area I’m still interested in.

HOW HAS YOUR RACIAL AND CULTURAL IDENTITY IMPACTED YOUR WRITING JOURNEY?

Exploring my immigrant side vs. my American side is something that overtly pops up in some of my work—I’m definitely inspired by work like Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. More broadly, though, people were often confused when I described myself as a creative writer since they assumed that I was just an engineer or doctor-to-be. In other words, I had already established myself as a “STEM guy,” which many felt was incompatible with being a “creative writing guy.” Therefore, I was a bit hesitant to embrace creative writing at first. For example, when I took the short story class I mentioned before, I feared judgment for my clear lack of experience. But I wasn’t behind; in fact, our class was a varied bunch, ranging from high schoolers to older IT professionals. With their support, I wrote and edited my first short story. I later wanted to create a similar support network for my high school, so I founded a campus literary magazine. Through the magazine, I demonstrated that unorthodox backgrounds and writing was OK—and I hope that I was able to motivate writers who’ve shared my experiences. Now that I’m at college, I hope to get involved in the creative writing space and meet even more writers!

WHAT IS THE BEST PIECE OF WRITING ADVICE YOU’VE EVER RECEIVED?

My short story teacher said to not be afraid to edit a rough draft down to its bare bones. It hurts in the beginning, but it's 100% important. That advice is also very relevant to poetry—every word needs to matter. This doesn’t mean that the words you cut out were a waste of time—they were a necessary stepping stone to the final product.