Update: On October 7, the National Book Foundation announced that Becoming Ghost is one of five finalists for the National Book Award.
The poetry collection Becoming Ghost by Cathy Linh Che, Core Faculty in the Antioch MFA, has been longlisted for the prestigious National Book Award. Che is one of only ten poets being considered for the award. Che says that she is grateful to appear on the list, especially because it puts her “alongside some brilliant company, including the judges and the other longlisted poets.”
Becoming Ghost is about many things, says Che, but it’s centrally about her family’s lives as Vietnamese refugees who were used as extras in the filming of the Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now. “The book took ten years to write,” she explains, because she “had to feel through what it meant to lose family (to erasure and war, but also to disownment) while also bearing responsibility for the genocides we enable. It questions and reclaims power, opening up the possibility of poetry as a liberatory force.”
Che is a Vietnamese American writer and multidisciplinary artist whose work includes poetry, prose, film, and visual art. Since 2024 she has served as Core Faculty in Poetry in Antioch’s low-residency MFA program in Creative Writing. In the MFA program she mentors emerging writers and helps determine the larger structure and operations of the program. Che’s first poetry collection was Split, which won the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She is also the co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History.
The National Book Awards are presented annually by the National Book Foundation, which has a mission to “celebrate the best literature published in the country, expand its audience, and ensure that books remain a vital part of our culture.” The finalists for the 2025 awards will be announced on October 7, and the winners will be revealed on November 19.
