Photo: Callisto Moses, Minneapolis 2021
Sophia
"I've been told my poems feel like walking uphill. The breath slips away from the start, like learning how to kiss, like kissing and crying at the same time."
— on "Stay," Poetry Society of America · In Their Own Words
Poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms
Noemi Press · March 2026 · Poetry
A book of curses summoning an ecstatic performance of divas in glamorous form — Vietnamese tonality, displacement, and reclamation. Six spoken "scores" mirroring the tonal arc of the diasporic variety show "Paris by Night." Finalist for the 2023 Noemi Press Open Book Award; semifinalist for the 2022 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize.
Deep Vellum (March 2025) · the87press (November 2025, UK/Ireland) · Novel
A novel-as-opera traversing war, migration, and metamorphosis. Longlisted for the 2020 Dzanc Diverse Voices Prize; listed in The Millions' "Most Anticipated" for Winter 2025. Launched at Café OTO, London; adapted as a full ballet with Roanoke Ballet Theatre at the Moss Arts Center.
Deep Vellum · February 2023 · Poetry
Interrogating anonymity, the archive, and the poetics of the unnamed. Winner of the 2023 Sturm Award for Excellence (Phi Beta Kappa, Virginia Tech); finalist for the 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Award.
Deep Vellum · November 2021 · Poetry
Verse testimonies engaging the Vietnam/American War and the lyric as reparative witness. Finalist for the 2021 Big Other Book Award and CLMP's 2022 Firecracker Award. Featured in Poets.org "2021 Featured Fall Books" and Publishers Weekly.
Factory Hollow Press · March 2019 · Chapbook
Polyvocal, translingual — moving between address and song. Winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize, selected by Anaïs Duplan. Translated to Slovene by Itzok Osojnik as Dopisnik Medley.
Essay Press · February 2016 · Digital Chapbook
A declaration and refusal. The body insists on its distinction from the violence inscribed upon it. Winner of the 2015 Essay Press Digital Chapbook Contest, selected by Rosebud Ben-Oni.
Individual poems, essays, fiction, and hybrid works
Poetry
Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day)
Oxford Poetry
Michigan Quarterly Review (Mixtape)
Denver Quarterly
Prose, Hybrid & Criticism
Fence
Anthologized Work
Far Villages (Black Lawrence Press, 2020)
Antiracism Inc. (Punctum Books, 2019)
Abolishing Carceral Society (Common Notions, 2018)
Additional Publication Credits
Michigan Quarterly Review, Cola Literary Review, Gulf Coast, Salt Hill, La Piccioletta Barca, Dialogist, Firmament (Sublunary Editions), Annulet, Tyger Quarterly, mercury firs, Mantis, In Parentheses, Nat. Brut, jubilat, Hayden's Ferry Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Birdcoat Quarterly, Qu, Tahoma Literary Review, Oxidant|Engine, The Margins (AAWW), Seattle Review, Peach Mag, SAND Journal, Passengers Journal, Storm Cellar, Sepia Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Powder Keg, Puerto del Sol, Big Lucks, The Boiler Journal, Half Mystic, Cosmonauts Avenue, Yalobusha Review, Poor Claudia, Stone Canoe, killing fields journal, Chapter House Journal, Apogee Journal, Blunderbuss, and others.
Awards & Honors
Conversations, reviews, features, and media
Notable Media Features
The Brooklyn Rail · November 2023
Poetry Centered · University of Arizona Poetry Center · August 2023
"Enemy, Beloved" — Podcast Host
Curating recordings by Joy Harjo, Khaled Mattawa, and Carolyn Forché, and reads her own "Gibbons Howling."
"Between enemy and beloved, the distance is a breath."
ÁCCENTED (DVAN) · November 2022
"Dialogues in Diaspora: In the Spaces of Silence" — Interviewed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
"In the spaces of silence, diaspora speaks."
The Slowdown · Episode 698 · June 2022
"Morning Freight" — Read by Ada Limón
"For a world that demands immediacy and convenience, the slowness of letters feels like a rebellion." — Ada Limón
ÁCCENTED (DVAN) · October 2020
Interviews
Beyond the Zero · December 2025
Interview by Ben Lindner — End of Year Special, Part 5
Virginia Tech · August 2025
Beyond the Zero · July 2025
Four Way Review · May 2025
On Tetra Nova's nonlinearity, memory as anticipation vs. obliteration, and fractal structure.
"My mind bends continuously. It's unnatural and natural both."
Black Warrior Review · May 2025
Interview by Chinaecherem Obor
On "de Clérambault," non-linear time, past lives, vengeance, and genre promiscuity.
"I like to think of writing as a way of flitting through obscured doorways."
the thought of the thing · March 2025
"On Tetra Nova, endurance, and the body as archive."
Asian American Writers' Workshop · December 2021
Waking Up History — Conversation with Mai Der Vang
"When do we wake up history? And how do we wake up history?"
Berkeley Poetry Review · 2020
"My brain feels like a sealed Tupperware of days-old bone stew, all coagulated and a little jiggly at the top."
diacritics (DVAN) · October 2019
Murmurs of Dissent — Conversation with Vi Khi Nao
"The bones of the book were ready in my mind. I can only call it my way of 'feeling' forward."
LUD Literatura · July 2019
"Poezija nisem jaz, temveč nekaj, kar mi je bilo dano"
Interview by Andrej Hočeva, translated to Slovene.
"Poetry is not me, but rather something that was given to me."
Reviews & Critical Pieces
The Rumpus · March 2025
Review of Tetra Nova by Erin Vachon
"At once playful and devastating… Terazawa's polyvocal book signals a grand revolutionary beginning."
Publishers Weekly · July 2023
"Terazawa's lush imagination gorgeously renders the interconnectedness of a difficult world."
West Branch · February 2023
"No Longer the Bystander" — Review of Winter Phoenix by Esteban Rodríguez
"Terazawa is no longer the bystander — she is the reckoning itself."
Poetry Foundation · Harriet Books · November 2021
Review of Winter Phoenix by Layla Benitez-James
"Wildly inventive… the collection explores the complicated legacy of English, asking what it means for court proceedings to unfold in the language of the abuser."
VVA Veteran · November 2021
Review of Winter Phoenix by Bill McCloud
"These poems are about her 'ongoing survival as the daughter of her mother.'"
News & Features
Virginia Tech News · April 2025
Tetra Nova Ballet at the Moss Arts Center
"It's my first time working on a collaborative piece of this scope. There are more moving parts, figuratively and materially."
Poetry Society of America · February 2023
Sophia Terazawa on "Stay" — In Their Own Words
"'Stay' is a 'good-bye' placed on the first rung of a love story. An echo."
Short Films
2019
Give Me Refuge — Experimental Docufilm
"In Vietnam, it is November 26th. 7:33 A.M. It is very early morning. Sky is overcast. But very, very pleasant."
The body as site, the stage as ritual
Terazawa's performance practice exists at the intersection of spiritual intervention, political disobedience, and somatic ritual. Her work is deliberately undocumented — insisting on ephemerality and presence over archival capture.
Major Collaborations
Select Solo Performances
Selected Group Readings & Panels
Video
Why Resurrect It All Now — Poetry Film, 2017
Give Me Refuge — Experimental Docufilm, 2019
Unmasking Her Silence — Performance, 2015
Reading from Correspondent Medley — Factory Hollow Press
International residencies and performances in Slovenia, Germany, India, United Kingdom, Lesotho, and Eswatini.
Poet, novelist, performance artist
Sophia Terazawa is a Vietnamese-Japanese poet, novelist, and performance artist whose work moves across testimony and divination, war memory and erotic autonomy, the archival and the ephemeral. Her writing engages the Vietnam/American War, intergenerational trauma, diaspora, and the body as a site of historical inscription — not as identity credential but as compositional method.
She is the author of six books: the poetry collection Oracular Maladies (Noemi Press, 2026), the debut novel Tetra Nova (Deep Vellum, 2025 / the87press, UK/Ireland, 2025), and the collections Anon (Deep Vellum, 2023) and Winter Phoenix: Testimonies in Verse (Deep Vellum, 2021), alongside two chapbooks — Correspondent Medley (Factory Hollow Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and I AM NOT A WAR (Essay Press, 2016).
Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Oxford Poetry, Missouri Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, LitHub, The Cincinnati Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, and many others. It has been featured on the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, The Slowdown with Ada Limón, and in dialogue with Viet Thanh Nguyen on DVAN's ÁCCENTED. She is a member of She Who Has No Master(s), an international collective of women and non-binary artists of color.
Terazawa currently teaches poetry, fiction, hybrid forms, and form and theory as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Virginia Tech, where she also directs MFA thesis projects.
For readings, collaborations, and inquiries
Available for readings, performances, residencies, workshops, and collaborative projects.
