BIOGRAPHY
Titi Nguyen is a writer and dancer who explores love, identity, labor, belief systems, and womanhood through the dynamics of power, shame, and fragmented desires. She’s fascinated by the American quandary of freedom and personal notions of liberty. Her narratives explore the tension of living between borders, cultures, and languages, and her characters navigate personal and public landscapes of loneliness and landlessness within self, home, country. Titi’s writing has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The New York Times, Tin House blog, Paris Review Daily, Witness, and other magazines and podcasts. She received Crab Orchard Review's inaugural Feature Award in Literary Nonfiction, and has been awarded scholarships and residencies at Bread Loaf Writers Conference, MacDowell, and Hedgebrook. She earned her BA at Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA at Bennington College. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Titi lives in Brooklyn, New York. She loves a good ghost story.
PROJECT
While at Nawat Fes, Titi Nguyen will be working on her hybrid novel about freedom, ghosts, and what it means to be American through a colonized, immigrant lens. Her project is a meditation on masks and fragmented selves; womanhood and the desire, control, and politics conscripted on the female body; and love in all its unbound freedoms and the shadows of deep love gone awry in personal and universal mythologies of patriotism, nationalism, and racism. In the ancient medina of Fes, Titi will contemplate the effects of a rapidly changing world. Her book asks: what endures, and what is ephemeral? Titi explores the polarizing forces and dualities that divide but also connect us to each other. With intent to manipulate and integrate such narrow binaries, she’ll play with ancient concepts, origin myths, Jungian archetypes, circadian rhythms, etc. Intrigued by the global shift from political, religious, and societal structures to personal systems of faith, Titi looks forward to studying the guiding principles and rituals of Islam alongside Berber astrology's own unique language and tracking system of heavenly bodies and their ancient roles as maps, timelines, and teachers. This writing project serves as a seed to launch multimedia projects and interdisciplinary collaborations, rooted within the themes of Titi’s novel. With that vision in mind, she is thrilled for the opportunities to experience and capture the daily/eternal + mundane/cosmic ordered beauty and chaos of prismatic Fes.
