Our first poet for the SoCal Asian American video oral history project: Brandon Som, an Echo Park resident and recipient of the 2015 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for his book The Tribute Horse.

Brandon Som is the author of the The Tribute Horse, selected by Kazim Ali for the 2012 Nightboat Poetry Prize, and Babel’s Moon, winner of the Tupelo Press Snowbound Prize. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Indiana Review, Black Warrior Review, Best New Poets 2007, McSweeney’s Poets Picking Poets, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. He holds degrees from Arizona State University and the University of Pittsburgh and has recently earned his Ph.D. in the Creative Writing and Literature program at the University of Southern California.