Washington Writers' Publishing House

Washington Writers’ Publishing House is the longest, continuously-operating cooperative nonprofit literary small press in the United States

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Nicole Tong

Nicole Tong is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Fairfax County, Virginia. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sundress Academy at Firefly Farms, George Mason University where she received her MFA. In 2016, she served as a Writer-in-Residence at Pope-Leighey House, a Frank Lloyd Wright property in Alexandria, Virginia. She is a recipient of the President’s Sabbatical from Northern Virginia Community College where she is a Professor of English. Her writing has appeared in American Book Review, CALYX, Cortland Review, and Yalobusha Review among others. She is also the winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, awarded to her debut collection, How to Prove a Theory, announced by Washington Writers’ Publishing House in 2017.

2017 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize Winner

WWPH Publications by Nicole Tong

Testimonials

  • Balanced between before and after, breathes Nicole Foreman Tong’s How to Prove a Theory, a collection of poems impeccably made. If poetry can work as solace in the face of loss, these poems are the proof. Like a science of grief, it has though Tong understands the delicate necessity of opening in order to hold onto anything. The present is always vast / matters where nothing else / worlds. Quite simple: this is a beautiful debut.

    Sally Keith

  • The evidence Nicole Tong’s How to Prove a Theory offers is a testimony of storms and tides, of memory and forgotten insights, each deeply moving poem a thought experiment, a theory to explain the inexplicable.

    You’ll want to read this stunning debut collection twice in one sitting—once straight through for the cumulative effect, then again more slowly to savor individually Tong’s meticulously wrought images, the apt placement of each word in the seamless architecture of Tong’s lines, the sheer authority of her voice.

    Luisa A. Igloria

  • Grief runs through the book, a grief that threatens with each new storm surge to sweep away forever what is past, and yet does not. The poems themselves are the bulwark of resistance, of resilience against loss. The poet resurrects mirrors—both the defenseless and the forgiving—whose gaze itself may stand, like these poems, as defense against the pressures of the self-defeating. Instead, she triumphs in the clarity and limpidity of this language. What a wonderful, amazing young poet’s next book!

    Jennifer Atkinson

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