Writings

Creative Nonfiction / Essays

• “Spirit Story” – Spring 2026 issue, hais: a literary journal
• “Hollow” – Two Hawks Quarterly, Spring 2025
• “Literary Orphan” and “A Language Narrative” – Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement, Issue 20, 2025
• “Are We Getting Out?” – Fall 2024, Watershed Review
• “Flaws” – Issue 25: Summer/Fall 2024, Lunch Ticket
  • Winner of the Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction, judged by Edgar Gomez, who writes: “A poignant exploration of grief, identity, and the weight of familial expectations, Flaws offers us the lyrical and evocative story of a daughter unpacking her relationship with her ailing father. Jer Xiong avoids easy answers, instead leaning into complexity to ultimately create a rich and deeply felt portrait of a family. Compassionate, nuanced, full of haunting imagery, I gasped when I reached the last line.”
• “Koi” – Spring 2023 issue, hais: a literary journal
• “Calling” – Spring 2023 issue, The Cincinnati Review
  • Selected for the Notable List for The Best American Essays, 2024.
• “How losing our Hmong dolls led me to unearth a piece of my culture” at Los Angeles Times (December 5, 2022)
  • The extended version (with no paywall) at Zócalo Public Square: “The Hmong Dolls We Lost, and the Story I Found“
• “So what now with the house gone?” in glassworks (flash glass) (June 2021)
  • Nominated by glassworks for Best of the Net 2021
• “Blooming Lineage” in hais: a literary journal (May 2021) *Read the republished piece on Medium.
• “Sitting Across From My Father” in Celebrate Hmong (December 2019) *Read the republished piece on Medium.
• “A Path to the Ancestors” in 559 JOUR-NAL (Spring 2019) *Read the republished piece on Medium.

Poetry

• “Verigo” & “lockdown” in the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement (June 2021)
• “The Jump” published in Pos Moua’s Karst Mountains Will Bloom (Blue Oak Press, 2019)
• “Silver” in maivmai (April 2019)
• “Losing Language” in Flies, Cockroaches and Poets (Spring 2019). Republished in maivmai (August 2019): “Losing Language.”

Thoughts on Medium

• “Di at the very least deserves recognition: A review and reflection on ‘Children of the Mist’ Documentary” on Medium (Feb 2023)
• Medium Writers Challenge, August 2021 – Prompt: “Space.” “Home, a fragile space“
• “An unexpected and bittersweet reflection from Sunisa Lee’s gold win” on Medium (August 2021)