Chrysanthemum is a Vietnamese American poet, performance artist & historian. A Kundiman Fellow, she is the recipient of a MacColl Johnson Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation & Women of the World Poetry Slam finalist.

CHRYSANTHEMUM is a poet, performance artist, and public historian. She serves as Co-Director of the Providence Poetry Slam, one of the oldest slam venues in the US. She is the recipient of a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Kundiman Fellow, and a 2023 Justin Chin Memorial Scholarship from Lambda Literary. In 2024, she was named the inaugural Poet-in-Residence for LGBTQ Writers in Schools’ first LGBTQ+ Youth Poet Laureate Residency.

Chrysanthemum broke ground as a finalist of the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam. Her teams were champions of the Rustbelt Poetry Slam and the first-ever FEM Slam. Through a MacColl Johnson Fellowship awarded by the Rhode Island Foundation, she organized the Vanishing Point Writing Retreat to connect Asian poets in diaspora through collaborative, peer-led instruction. Chrysanthemum modeled this after Rachel McKibbens’ Pink Door Writing Retreat, of which she is an alumna.

With long-time collaborator Justice Ameer, with whom she served as Artist-in-Residence at Williams College, she co-wrote and co-produced ANTHEM at the American Repertory Theater's OBERON, weaving poetry, music, song, and media arts into a lyrical performance exploring the lasting legacies of vanguards on the contours of race, sex, and gender. "Moments of rare joy and celebrations of survival are part of the premise," wrote WBUR about the debut show.

Chrysanthemum is a Vietnamese American poet, performance artist & historian. A Kundiman Fellow, she is the recipient of a MacColl Johnson Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation & Women of the World Poetry Slam finalist.

Photo: Courtesy of the Women of the World Poetry Slam

A humble part of the volunteer team that organizes the Providence Poetry Slam, Rhode Island’s longest-running poetry slam and open mic venue which hosts shows every first and third Thursday of the month at AS220, Chrysanthemum has had the immense privilege of mentoring youth poets and representing her home venue at the National Poetry Slam, reaching 5th place in 2015.

Chrysanthemum’s writing can be read in The Nation, Them, The Offing, Get Lit Anthology, Bettering American Poetry & Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience, among others. Her poetry can be viewed on Button Poetry and Ours Poetica — curated by Charlotte Abotsi and Sarah Kay in a collaboration between Complexly and The Poetry Foundation.

Chrysanthemum is a Vietnamese American poet, performance artist & historian. A Kundiman Fellow, she is the recipient of a MacColl Johnson Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation & Women of the World Poetry Slam finalist.

Photo: Courtesty of East Meets Words Bookstore

With appearances on PBS and the New York Times Video, Chrysanthemum has performed poems and led writing workshops across the country, including visits to Harvard University, Yale University, University of Chicago, Asian American Writers' Workshop, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Skirball Cultural Center, the Cantab Lounge, and East Meets Words.

Now calling Providence home, she was born to Vietnamese parents in Oklahoma City, where she came of age around the 39th Street gayborhood and the Asian District. She is an alumna of the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute at Quartz Mountain, which she attended in 2011 and 2013 as a teenager studying photography. Outside of poetry and performance, she might be moonlighting from the underbelly of trans health systems. Chrysanthemum is currently completing her debut collection of poems, which explores contradictions, deletions, and distortions in queer archives by reckoning with legal, medical, and military histories of essentialism.

(Once known as Chrysanthemum Tran)

Chrysanthemum is represented by Tyler Tsay at The Speakeasy Project for booking inquiries.