Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
twitter: @thiriimkm
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is the author of the lyric novel The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, A Haven, published by Noemi Press in March 2018, and the family history project Zat Lun, which won the 2018 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2021. She currently lives in Colorado, where she is completing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Denver, editing the Denver Quarterly, and teaching hybrid forms and narrative nonfiction at the nonprofit Lighthouse Writers Workshop. In the fall, Thirii will begin teaching fiction and literature at Amherst College in Massachusetts as a visiting writer.
Thirii’s writing explores the concept of alterity and how it is constructed through language and stories. She is particularly interested in the possibility of moving beyond dualistic understandings of identity and belonging—same versus different, here versus there, us versus them. Her work often focuses on experiences of liminality and hybridity, and the process of un-othering language. Her first novel, The End of Peril, which is about, among other things, environmental devastation, return from migration, motherhood, and love between girls, drew inspiration from Anna Kavan’s Ice, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Marie Redonnet’s trilogy, Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.
Thirii is currently reading Jean Toomer’s Cane, a decade after it was first assigned to her in college, and I Remember Nightfall, a collection of Marosa di Giorgio’s poetry, translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas. This weekend, Thirii built a snow person at a haunted park and has plans to go ice-skating at a lake next weekend.
website: thiriimyokyawmyint.com
selected publications:
- “End of Peril”
- “Zat Lun”
- “Bliss Place”, Black Warrior Review
- “The Incubation of Liam Jin Tao,” New Delta Review
- “Ghost Story,” Split Lip Magazine, also forthcoming in the Forward Anthology