Dinh, whose short stories have appeared in the literary journals and short fiction magazines Zoetrope, Five Points, Epoch, Chicago Review, Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and Harpur Palate, had applied for an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Prose twice before, and this time was one of just 40 authors selected for the award from a pool of more than 777 applicants.
“I've been writing ever since I was young, starting off with little horror and ghost stories, because that's what I loved,” said Dinh, “but I began writing and publishing seriously around college and right after.
“A lot of writing nowadays also is being aware of the business of writing and consistently sending work away and not getting too disheartened by the rejection,” he added.
A native of Vietnam, Dinh said he sometimes weaves threads of his heritage into short stories, but added that dominant themes in his work are catastrophe and misfortune. “I'd say a theme that runs through a lot of my writing is disaster,” he said, “and that's the theme for my novel, as well.”
To this end, Dinh will be taking a break from teaching this coming semester and will be using some of the NEA Fellowship money to fund a research trip to India. Once there, he will visit the site of a devastating earthquake that occurred seven years ago and speak with aid workers. Before he goes, he said he also hopes to begin research closer to home by talking with researchers at UD's Disaster Research Center.
Favorite contemporary authors include Deborah Eisenberg and David Means, but Dinh said that his “favorite author of all time” is Franz Kafka.
He describes his own stories as falling somewhere between realistic fiction and fantastic realism, although some, he said, are firmly rooted in the world while others “go very far” from reality.
After earning bachelor's degrees in creative writing and biology at Johns Hopkins University and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Houston, Dinh taught creative writing at The Lighthouse Writers, a nonprofit organization in Denver, before relocating to Delaware in the fall of 2006.
His work is featured in current issues of Five Points and Epoch, and will appear in the spring issue of the Harpur Palate.
Article by Becca Hutchinson
Photo by Duane Perry