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. Recently, he earned an AA in Film from El Camino College.
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 Journal. 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, and Dorland. He has been awarded a Jack Hazard Fellowship by the New Literary Project, a Work-Study Scholarship to Bread Loaf, and a General Motors Future Fiction Scholarship to study Science Fiction and Fantasy writing at Aspen Summer Words. 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 nationally-recognized authors. For that effort, he was named the 2024 Long Beach Unified Teacher of the Year. In 2025, he was selected to run with Team TCS Teachers in the New York Marathon and attend the Viable Paradise Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop.
He has worked as a comic book store shop boy, city hall legislative aide, basketball coach, and non-profit communications director. He now lives in Southern California where he teaches English and film.