San Francisco poet and professor Truong Tran contains multitudes.

“I’m gay, I’m Vietnamese, I’m the son of immigrant parents, I’m a teacher, I’m a lifelong student and dyslexic,” he says.  

Tran’s vocations and self-claimed labels surely bind him to several unique and complex communities, yet his chosen identity is a simple one. 
 
“Human being. I think there’s a lot of us here, trying to find connection,” he says. 

Tran’s work is about living. His ninth book, “How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir” (City Lights, 240 pages, Oct. 20, 2026), which he launches this week at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, is a candid series of pieces on personal and professional encounters with racism, heterosexism and neurodivergence. At once a reckoning with those facts of American life and his feelings about it, the writing has served to offload shames he’s carried, though not necessarily of his own volition. 
 
“Somewhere in these stories of past and otherness, there is the story of wanting and belonging,” he writes. “I am still wanting to belong to a world that is still wanting to be better than what it was and what it is.” 
 
“When something like racism happens, it’s put on you and you carry it,” he says. “It took me a long time to understand I was carrying someone else’s shame and I could put it down.” 

After leaving Saigon with his family as a child in the 1970s, Tran grew up in San Jose among immigrants and refugees, mostly from Vietnam and Mexico. Reading initially was difficult for him due to what he discovered was dyslexia. As a young artist, he wanted to draw: “I had a teacher who said to me, no, you should do something else and to this day I wonder, how does someone get to say that?…It wasn’t until much later in life that I went for visual art.” 

Recently, Tran, who has lived in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood since 2002, has been spending more time in the South Bay, the environment he escaped when he left for college at University of California, Santa Cruz and post-graduate work at San Francisco State University.  
 
 “I think what draws me back is we have all evolved as human beings and find ourselves moving through a changed world,” he says.  “I’m having conversations with my community in San Jose about things like trans rights…I’m having conversations with my friends about dyslexia and special needs. I didn’t grow up in a time when those conversations happened,” he says, “And the Vietnamese food is really great.” 

Having seen two generations of students pass through his classroom and become poets and educators themselves, he cites poets Mimi Tempestt and Trinh Lê and the arts community of booksellers and arts programmers as touchpoints for the future. Nevertheless, the closures of Mills College, San Francisco Art Institute and ultimately California College of the Arts at the end of this 2026-27 academic year put the local arts community in peril. 
 
“We’re seeing a lot of that and I’m happy Northeastern [University in Oakland] is making an effort. We have a creative writing minor. I hope we will continue to grow and find our footing in this new world and I’m hoping for the best of possibilities,” he said, noting his colleague Juliana Spahr, won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. 
 
For his City Lights event this week, Tran chose his editor Garrett Caples as a conversation partner. It’s an unconventional move, given that editors’ work usually takes place behind the scenes and is largely invisible to the public. 
 
“When I first handed Garrett the book, it was a book of essays and Garrett’s first response was, ‘It’s a memoir.’ And I was quite surprised by that response,” Tran says. “He did a deep dive and saw it for what it could be. He held a space for me to think through the book in many ways and honestly, it was quite an experience. It brought me to an understanding and trust of the person right there in front of me, again.” 

In the book, Tran toggles between the sweetness of connection, as in one piece that embraces his first grader godson, then flips on his own bitter memories of first grade: both/and, at the same time. Over 200 pages, slights and cruelties, some endured over a lifetime and others surfaced more recently, do not escape Tran’s rumination, his memory at once a steel trap and permeable, colliding with past and present realities. 

Part of the new book speaks to his 2021 title “Book of the Other: small in comparison,” a recounting of the racism he experienced specifically as an academic. 
 
“For the life of me, I cannot seem to write about flora and fauna. I write about race as though my life depended on it,” he writes in a piece titled “On teaching and imagination.” 
 
Tran’s approach as an English professor at Northeastern University in Oakland is the inverse to his early experience in the classroom. 
 
“I’m there to encourage my students and give them the permission to be. Who they are at this moment does not convey to me who they will become,” he says.  
 
“I think part of this work is to say that I am the sum of all parts,” he said on an atypically warm day in San Francisco. In conversation, as on the page, Tran does not obfuscate his whole self. 
 
“That is the work of writing for me, the search, as opposed to the answer or arrival.” 
 
Truong Tran launches “How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir” at 2 p.m. Oct. 18 at City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco; RSVP here.