"Now I teach at a very 'experimental' program. UC San Diego doesn’t even recognize the genre divide. I’m eager to see how my pedagogy and teaching methods will change in this kind of open environment—and I can only imagine inspiration. When people ask me what I teach, I tell them that I inspire creativity, and that’s a very prized privilege."
— Lily Hoàng
In 2008, Lily Hoàng published her debut novel Parabola, the winner of Chiasmus Press's Un-Doing the Novel Contest — the same experimental novel Hoàng was working on during her time in the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Notre Dame. In an interview with Experimental Fiction / Poetry, Hoàng writes, "Most of the chapters in [Parabola] are my attempt to 'cheat' the system by putting little pieces next to each other & seeing what that juxtaposition does. As for the layering of the text, I used it twice, well, three times technically. The first two instances, with short shorts inside geometric shapes, were my attempt to show how easily truths are covered & to mirror the jumbled nature of this world. It's hard to distinguish what is what."
Parabola, which follows the curve of a parabola, features everything from interactive personality tests and mathematical formulas to a coming-of-age story featuring full-color photographs. Steve Tomasula has called Hoàng a "daring writer" of "conceptually ambitious fiction woven from the lyrical language of longing." Parabola also received glowing praise from authors Lance Olsen ("you will never see the novel in the same way again"), Michael Martone ("a tour de form with force multipled further"), and Carole Maso ("A work of proportion, grace, tenderness, ferocity").
In 2015, Wayne Koestenbaum selected Hoàng's A Bestiary as the winner of The Cleveland State University Poetry Center's Essay Collectoin Competition. Of Hoàng's debut colleciton of essays, the judge wrote, "A Bestiary is a work of great subtlety, precision, intelligence, daring, and emotive keenness. It seems completely contemporary (by which I mean that it is unlike anything I’ve read and that it makes me want to change my own writerly procedures). With headlong, reckless, improvisatory gestures, Lily Hoàng prompts us to rethink what literature today can dare to aspire to."
In an interview with Catherine Lasota for The Rumpus, Hoàng discusses genre, fairy tales, teaching, craft, and re-imagining form. "The essay as a form," Hoàng writes, "is neccesarily experimental (essay comes from essai, meaning to trial, to experiment). More often than not, when reviewers, etc. talk about my book, they call it poetry. Others have called it fiction (that's a bit futher of a stretch!), but while writing this book, I was keenly aware of the parameters of nonfiction and how I can and do engage with the genre of the essay." A Bestiary would go on to be a finalist for the PEN/USA Non-Fiction Award.
More recently, Hoàng published Underneath (2021), the winner of Red Hen Press's Fiction Award. Underneath, a true-crime novel based on real events, explores the actions of a serial killer named Martha Johnson. While the book has garnered praise from authors like Blake Butler ("Fearless, brilliant, and incessant, Underneath is both a page-turner and a beast") and Selah Saterstrom ("Underneath creates a haunted house inside of which we confront not only the tyranny of bad mothers, but the systems that aid in their creation"), Hoàng has admitted her fifth book is not an easy read. "Underneath really is quite different from anything I've written before," says Hoàng in an interview with the New York State Writers Institute, "The bulk of my published work uses fairy tale as either narrative mode or method of inquiry—which of course Underneath does, too, but this novel is, at its core, realist. It's based on a real, living human, and real historical fact [...] I used the basic, recorded facts about Martha's life and her crimes, but Martha is also completely imagined. I know nothing about the real woman: I used her crimes to create her character."
This past February, Spuyten Duyvil released The Mute Kids, Hoàng's seventh book of prose. The Mute Kids, features both cover art and a blurb by Vi Khi Nao:
Lily Hoang’s The Mute Kids overcomes the initial silence implied by its title through its chitonsic nature, perceptiveness, and minimalism. 1000 eyes seem to grow out of Hoang’s vast and clever imagination—taking all her lexical donations to a mythological, feral space only those không có miệng có thể nói được.
— Vi Khi Nao, author of The Italian Letters
On November 6th, Texas A&M University Press's Innovative Prose Series (edited by Katie Jean Shinkle) will release Hoàng's "fairy tale" collection of stories: A Knock at the Door.