Doan Phuong Nguyen was in the first grade when she decided her dream was to be an author. Having recently arrived in Nashville from Vietnam, she’d just mastered English and was fascinated when her class made a book about the seasons. “I’ve wanted to write stories ever since then,” she says. The dream came to fruition in 2023 with the publication of her first novel 
for middle grade readers, Mèo and Bé (Lee and Low Books, 2023; illustrated by Jesse White). The International Reading Association has added it to its list of Notable Books for a Global Society.
The story of Bé, an 11-year-old girl in wartime Vietnam, and her beloved cat, Mèo, doesn’t shy away from harsh realities, but the book keeps its tender audience in mind. “All of the harder parts of the book happen offscreen. Bé never experiences it; she’s just around it,” Nguyen says, noting that while adults can understand the full implications of what the girl witnesses, younger readers are mainly engaged by “Bé’s journey to find a family and a place of belonging.”
Mèo and Bé was inspired in part by the experiences of Nguyen’s adopted aunt. Nguyen’s father, an officer in the South Vietnamese Army, was imprisoned by the postwar communist regime, and he brought his family to the U.S. in 1991 through a program to relocate prisoners of war. They settled in Nashville and their local sponsors, says Nguyen, “became our adopted family in America.” Two of their “American grandmothers” were Vanderbilt graduates—Helen Sterling, BA’36, MA’38, and Katherine Moore White, BA’46. They inspired Nguyen and her younger sister Bichlien, BA’10, to follow in their footsteps.
Nguyen soaked up poetry and creative writing classes at Vanderbilt, but at the suggestion of English professor Cecelia Tichi she studied sociology, ultimately making it her major. “I was very naïve,” she says. “Sociology opened my eyes to social issues in the wider world.” She worked in publishing after college, then built a business as a wedding and portrait photographer, which allowed her to devote more time to writing. After winning a grant from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, she earned an M.F.A. at Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2019 and completed the manuscript for Mèo and Bé.
Nguyen now divides her time between Nashville and St. Louis, pursuing photography in both cities, but her goal is to be a full-time writer. Her fictionalized memoir in verse for young readers, A Two-Placed Heart, will be published this fall by Lee and Low via their Tu Books imprint. “It’s about trying to figure out my identity—my Vietnamese identity and my American identity—and trying to merge those two,” she says. She’s developing an idea for a fantasy novel and plans to stay in the tween and teen literary space. “I think I have a middle grade voice,” she says. “I don’t think I’ll ever write for an adult audience.”
— MARIA BROWNING
