Bio

Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a writer and a poet from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared in Longleaf Review, West Trestle Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of the South (Sewanee) and is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is currently the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She has authored two poetry chapbooks, MONSOON DAUGHTER (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022) and UNSPRUNG (Newfound, 2023).

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Growing up a woman and an artist under a military dictatorship, Mandy used language to find her voice until writing became an act of survival. At 21, she co-founded the Yangon Literary Magazine, providing a platform for young and emerging Burmese writers to showcase their work. Her work explores themes of identity—national, cultural, and personal—and movement, in particular homegoing and homecoming. As an international scholar from Yangon, Myanmar, which is currently undergoing a revolution (yet again), she is constantly interrogating her own relationship with her home country and her host country. Her work reflects the impact of this almost constant movement, often framed in terms of familial relationships.

 

In her spare time, you can find her drinking elaborate lattes and ruminating on life and death in local cemeteries and botanical gardens.