Leigh Victoria Phan, MS, MFA
Bio
Writer, bookworm, sci-fi space cadet, and coffee+tea fanatic living in Brooklyn. I have an MS in Integrated Design & Media and an MFA in Fiction from NYU. I share poetry on Instagram as @SleeplessAuthoress.
Achievements (7)
Stories (166)
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I Want This World to Last
How often do you pause for a moment and appreciate the world around you? Ephemeral Blooms This poem was inspired by a very simple daily event. I was walking down a sidewalk at work and saw how it was positively papered with fallen flowers. Even though it's all part of the usual cycle of things, it felt like the trees bloomed then shed their flowers in the blink of an eye. I put my writer's hat on and started thinking a little more about the literary implications of the pattern. It started my mind down the path of thinking about how flowers have short lifespans, but live them beautifully and vibrantly.
By Leigh Victoria Phan, MS, MFA7 years ago in Poets
Heartbeats - Romantic Visual Poetry
I've been writing poetry since 2005 and when I was first started, I was positively mad about writing every thought that crossed my mind. There were also, embarrassingly, quite a lot of terrible love poems. I was a very young teenager back then and my work was extremely rough and unpolished.
By Leigh Victoria Phan, MS, MFA7 years ago in Poets
Standing Up for Your Choices
Standing up to disapproving family members to defend your relationship choices isn’t easy, but women have been standing up for what they want for hundreds of years — even in China in 170 CE. During the Eastern Han dynasty, a young woman known as Lady Wu did just that.
By Leigh Victoria Phan, MS, MFA7 years ago in Viva
Tips for Introverts on Surviving Small Talk
Even when I genuinely enjoy conversations and interactions with my colleagues, I need time to recharge afterward. I’m an introvert and my coworkers are a mix of very different people from very different backgrounds. Thus, I want to share a few tips on how I get through my week.
By Leigh Victoria Phan, MS, MFA8 years ago in Journal
Empowering Women in Classical China
Around 190 CE China, it was common for girls’ personal names to be unrecorded by history. Instead, all we have left is to know them by their family names. One such woman born in this era was Lady Sun, but she didn’t let society stop her from trampling over gender norms with her one hundred armed female soldiers. This kind of female empowerment and early feminism is a rare find in this time period. A unit of female guards, all armed with swords and other weapons, was positively unheard of in the Han Dynasty, but when China split into three separate kingdoms, things like gender norms became a little more relaxed.
By Leigh Victoria Phan, MS, MFA8 years ago in Viva
