Her debut novel, Daughters of the New Year, is out this month from Hanover Square Press/HarperCollins. Her stories, essays, and reviews can be found
in such places as the Georgia Review, Joyland Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Harvard Review Online, and more.
Tran spent an inordinate proportion of her adult life working towards an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Mississippi and a PhD in English & Creative Writing from Ohio University.
She is from and currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, with her husband and two dogs.
At Electric Lit Tran tagged eight novels "about family history passed down from mother to daughter," including:
The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế MaiRead about the other entries on the list.
The Mountains Sing follows two timelines: one from the perspective of Trấn Diệu Lan, who flees North Vietnam during the Communist land reform in 1954, and another from the perspective of her granddaughter, Hương, during the Vietnam War of the 1970s. By alternating chapters in each timeline, we can see how history cycles again and again, forcing each generation to carry their own traumas reproduced by wars rooted in conflicts long past. The resilience of women, as they continue to protect family and community despite French colonization, Japanese occupation, and Communist political machinations, and displacement, endures in this narrative.
--Marshal Zeringue
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