“The tension of exile, of adopted nation and home country, has always been present in my work; I am constantly navigating it.” – Mandy Moe Pwint Tu
2 min read
Team Kitaab is in conversation with Mandy Moe Pwint Tu, author of Fablemaker (September 2025, Gaudy Boy).
Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, Beloit Poetry Journal, Porter House Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere, and she is the author of three poetry chapbooks, Monsoon Daughter (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022), Unsprung (Newfound, 2023), and Burma Girl (Gold Line Press, 2026).
She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.
About the Book
Born out of a myriad of griefs in the wake of Myanmar’s violent return to military rule, Fablemaker alchemizes the pains of a fractured life into heart song.
On February 1, 2021, Myanmar’s military staged a coup d’etat, imprisoning the country’s democratically elected leaders and declaring a state of emergency. In response, the people of Myanmar sustained ongoing protest acts in full defiance the military. Mandy Moe Pwint Tu’s debut, Fablemaker, written during the Spring Revolution, weaves together a troubled familial history and a national reckoning.
The collection follows the speaker as she contends with her father’s untimely death, her country’s crisis, and her de facto exile to the United States. Wrought with tenderness, the poems bear witness to loss, rage, grief, and love—and the fables she created to survive it all. Through Burmese folklore, formal invention, and addresses to a “dear fellow fablemaker,” Tu strives to imagine a self and a world that, after their devastation, recover.
