Hoa Nguyen is the founder and leader of a popular poetics workshop in cyberspace and Toronto. Her “legendary” poetics workshops has been active for twenty-two years and enjoys an international following. An essay on the workshops and pedagogy has been included in the anthology Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa, 2010) and in the Bagley Wright lecture series.

With the poet Dale Smith, Hoa founded a small press journal of poetry and poetics, publishing contemporary poets such as Amiri Baraka, Alice Notley, Kenward Elmslie, and Eileen Myles. Nationally distributed, Skanky Possum has received attention from media such as The Baltimore Sun and Poets and Writers. In 2002, as editor of Best American Poetry, Robert Creeley selected poems by four poets that were published in Issue 6 of Skanky Possum. Skanky Possum’s catalogue has been collected by several prominent archives and Special Collections including San Francisco University, SUNY Buffalo, University of Arizona’s Poetry Center, and the New York Public Library. Her contributions to local and national poetry communities through reading series curation and editing has been documented by co-editor Dale Smith in a publication for the University of Buffalo Libraries Among the Neighbors 4.

Participation in roles of mentorship and service are critical features to her life as a writer and educator, illustrating her practice of supporting writing communities to better shape and understand shared values and concerns. To that end, she remains a strong public proponent and advocate of contemporary poetry through professional service in literary assessment, selection, and editing roles. As editor she selected and introduced the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology, the 2018 edition of Best Canadian Poetry in English, and the Poetry in Voice 2018-2020 anthologies. She has served as a judge for major literary prizes including the 2023 Four Quartets Prize, the Glascock Poetry Competition Centennial, the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize, the 2020 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the 2020 Klein Prize for the Quebec Writers' Federation, and the 2019 Latner Prize for the Writers Trust. She has also served as juror for a Writer’s Works in Progress Grant for Ontario Arts Council in 2016; as judge for the 2016 and 2017 bpNichol Chapbook Awards; and as the final judge for manuscript selection for book prizes for presses such as OmniDawn, Saturnalia, and Fence Books.

Hoa Nguyen's poetry has been collected in many anthologies including Altered States (Ignota Books 2021), Inheriting the War: Poetry & Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees (Norton, 2017),The Best of The Best Canadian Poetry in English: Tenth Anniversary Edition (Tightrope Books 2017), Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion (Abram Books 2016), Best Canadian Poetry In English 2015 and 2016 (Tightrope Books), The Volta Book of Poets (Sidebrow, 2015), Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sound: The Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose (City Lights 2009), The Best of Fence (Fence Books 2009), For the Time Being: A Bootstrap Anthology (Bootstrap Books 2008), Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions 2008), and Not for Mothers Only (Fence Books 2007).

Hoa is a member of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of womxn and nonbinary writers of the Vietnamese diaspora who engage in collaborative, polyvocal, and hybrid-poetic works to enact a politics of connection across diasporic boundaries. Through a collaborative writing and art process, SWHNM explores multi-voiced collectivity, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diaspora. In 2021, she became a founding mentor in SWHNM’s writing mentorship program designed for and led by Vietnamese and SE Asian diasporic women and nonbinary writers.