Poet and fiction writer Steven Duong will read from his debut poetry collection, At the End of the World There Is a Pond, then engage in a lively conversation and moderated Q&A led by Farah Bakaari, PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, and soon-to-be visiting professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, before concluding with a book signing.

About the Book: At the End of the World There Is a Pond is a book about aftermaths. Each poem comes in the wake of a deep rupture—the ruptures of mental illness and addiction, of migration and displacement, of violence, familial conflict, and ecological catastrophe—and yet the speakers engage with despair and playfulness in equal measure, always allowing humor, irony, and the exuberance of contemporary life to bend darkness toward something like hope. Again and again, Duong’s writing excavates the unnatural conditions of a seemingly natural world, asking us to pay studied attention to its inhabitants. His poems force us to keep looking: at the betta fish trapped in its mason jar, the forest choked by invasive kudzu, the elephant wounded in a landmine blast. Through its relentless scrutiny and exacting care, this magisterial debut collection poses an impossible question: how can we reconcile a deep love for the world, in all its buzzing, wriggling aliveness, with an equally deep, self-destructive desire to leave it behind?

About the Author: Steven Duong is a writer from San Diego. He is the author of the debut poetry collection At the End of the World There Is a Pond (W. W. Norton, 2025). His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Guernica, and the Yale Review, among other publications, and his short fiction is featured in Catapult, The Drift, and The Best American Short Stories 2024. The recipient of fellowships and awards from Kundiman, the Academy of American Poets, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is currently a creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University. He lives in Atlanta.

Farah Bakaari is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Her research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century African literature, postcolonial studies, political theory and the novel as well as the relationship between aesthetics and politics. She was born and raised in Somaliland.