Pacyinz Lyfoung

Pacyinz Lyfoung is a French-born, Hmong American woman poet. She currently resides in Washington, DC; however, she is Minnesota-grown, especially in her poetry. Her ears were opened to the possibility of becoming an Asian American poet after attending a reading by Bao Phi, then an emerging poet still in college. Her first poetic steps were taken as a Loft’s Asian Pacific Islander Inroad Fellow learning from Sherry Quan Lee. Since then, in between other life commitments, she has steadily developed as a non-MFA poet, taking BIPOC community poetry classes with Voices of Our Nations (VONA)’s incomparable teachers such as Elmaz Ebinader, Ruth Forman and David, Winter Tangerine, Split this Rock and Sally Wen Mao at the Jenny McKean Moore Workshop. She has published in several journals and anthologies and is still working on her first poetry manuscript. She has led Wednesday community workshops for Split this Rock, curated a breakout room for the BIPOC Writing Workshop (a grassroots virtual group that sprung up as a support and creative space during the pandemic lockdown and has met with no fail every week), and recently won the DC Poet Project’s Nature Open Mic, officially establishing her as a dual citizenship Minnesotan and Washingtonian poet.