Ky-Phong Tran and his family fled to the United States at the end of the Vietnam War, his mother six months pregnant with him at the time. He was raised on the Northside of Long Beach, California and educated in public school. He graduated from UCLA with a BA in History and MA in Asian American Studies and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside.
His non-fiction has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Orange County Register, the Huffington Post, New America Media, the Nguoi Viet Daily News, Zocalo Public Square, Stranger’s Guide, and Alta. His fiction was a finalist in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Short Story Contest and Narrative Magazine’s Short Story Contest and has appeared in Hyphen Magazine and the anthology Dismantle (AK Press, 2014). He has been selected to writing conferences and residencies at Voices of Our Nation, Napa Valley, Olympic Valley, Bread Loaf, and Dorland. He was named a Jack Hazard Fellow by the New Literary Project and a General Motors Future Fiction scholar to study Science Fiction and Fantasy writing at the Aspen Summer Words Writers Conference. At Renaissance High School for the Arts, he created the Yen and Dung Tran Distinguished Author Series, where public high school students read their work alongside notable writers such as Javier Zamora, Lee Herrick, and Gustavo Arellano. For that effort, he was named Long Beach Unified School District’s 2024-25 Teacher of the Year.
He has worked everywhere from a comic book store to city hall as a legislative aide. He now lives in Southern California where he teaches English and film.