Hoa Nguyen is considered a forerunner in the field of reading-centric, generative, community-based poetry workshops, founding her popular series in 1998 in Austin, TX. Her in-person, salon style workshops fostered a devoted following with many participants returning year after year and in 2011, Hoa brought her influential pedagogical practice to Toronto, ON. Always innovating, she developed a popular distance-learning option, broadening access and building a large, transnational community. Her influential workshop model and pedagogical practice has inspired many poets and teachers to adopt similar approaches and has been featured in the anthology Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa, 2010), the Bagley Wright lecture series, on Future Feed, and at the 2025 Modern Languages Association Conference in New Orleans.

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 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. As an imprint, Skanky Possum published chap-and full-length books and it’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. Hoa’s contributions to local and national poetry communities through her 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 Hoa’s 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 Hoa 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 2019 Latner Prize for the Writers Trust and the 2020 Griffin International Poetry Prize. More recently, she judged the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize, the Glascock Poetry Competition Centennial, and the 2023 Four Quartets Prize.

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. Hoa has been a frequent collaborator with the collective since 2017. Her involvement includes participation in residencies, curation, creation, and performance, with recent contributions to UC Berkeley’s Holloway Reading Series, Fertile Fest (Toronto), Pratt Institute's Writing Programs, PRISM International, and The Studios at Mass MoCA.