“instead the man of my Man shall leave his and his and his flesh.”
“Marriage was a pragmatic institution […] fidelity was an imposition on women, in order to know whose kids you need to feed and who gets the cows when I die. It was an economic thing. It had nothing to do with love.” — Esther Perel, The New Yorker (December 9, 2018)
“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” ― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
Norman Tran is a queer, neurodivergent Chinese American poet from Los Angeles and the child of Vietnam War refugees. Raised by computer scientists, Norman brings a systems approach to poetry, exploring how it takes language across disciplines to approximate messy human truths. Their work appears in Tell Me About the Dream (Papaya Press, 2025) and Multiplicity Magazine. Norman is a finalist for Hayden's Ferry Review's Poetry Contest, longlisted for Palette Poetry's Queer Poetry Prize, and recipient of scholarships from Hugo House and Frontier Poetry. They facilitate interpersonal dynamics workshops at Stanford GSB and are building a school for playful, intimate communication. Beyond poetry, they are an improviser, musician, designer, and hardcore gamer. Norman is working on their debut collection, which explores what language can and cannot measure in a life. You can find them wherever there's Vietnamese iced coffee, irresponsible chord progressions, and abundant alliteration.
