An Ngo Lang is a writer, speaker, storyteller, and actor. She was born in Việt Nam, where water buffaloes plodded through rice paddies and the aroma of phở lingered in the Sài Gòn morning air. In 1975, she fled with her family and landed in the American Midwest, land of big open skies, where golden wheat fields, and buffalo — of a different kind — sizzled on backyard grills.
She speaks Vietnamese and English with equal heart, and earned her degrees from Wichita State and Marquette University.
She knows what a well-told story can do — dissolve judgment, bridge distance, push open a small world to let the larger one in. It’s what drives both her writing and her speaking: the belief that one story, told honestly, can change the room it enters.
Her writing has found homes in Leatherneck, Kill Your Darlings, diaCRITICS, The VVA Veteran, Good Reading Magazine, and the other side of hope. In 2024, her short story The Best Pieces Not From Me was shortlisted for the global Hope Prize and published in the anthology Tomorrow There Will Be Sun. And in 2025, a piece was adopted into the Western Australian Year 12 ATAR English curriculum — where it will be studied by new cohorts of students annually, a distinction that puts her work in conversation with the next generation of readers and thinkers.
When she’s not at her desk, An steps in front of the camera. With over 80 credits across film, television, commercials, and corporate productions, she brings the same attention to character and nuance to performance that she brings to the page.
→See her acting and modeling work
An speaks on themes that matter: refugee experience and resilience, cultural identity and belonging, and the power of storytelling to build empathy across communities. She has spoken at the Manly Rotary Club and delivered the keynote address at the Manly Vietnam Veterans Day Memorial — twice.
Whether you’re looking for a speaker, a collaborator, or a story that stays with you — An would love to connect.
And when the camera is off and the laptop is closed — however briefly — she can be found in Sydney with her family and Jack, the dog who is convinced he is bilingual and guards against every bush turkey, delivery person, and skink that dares enter his terrier-tory.
Radio
In conversation with Nate Wenke on 2SER 107.3, An Ngo Lang discussed her short story The Best Pieces Not From Me, published in the 2024 Hope Prize anthology Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, exploring why she writes to preserve culture, and what it means to offer hope to people in despair.
→ Listen to the full interview
In the Media
Vietnamese Immigrants Remember Fleeing Home After the Fall of Sài Gòn — Northwest Asian Weekly, 2023
The Kabul Evacuation and Lessons from a Survivor of Saigon La Grange News, 2022
An Ngo Lang’s Refugee Story Northern Beaches Council News, 2019