[9] Viet is a regular contributor, op-ed columnist for The New York Times, covering immigration, refugees, politics, culture, and Southeast Asia.

[12][13][14][15] In the teaching field, in 2023, Viet is also the first Asian American to headline the Charles Eliot Norton Lecture Series at Harvard University.

[19][20] Viet's mother's real name is Nguyễn Thị Bảy and she is a highly influential person in his life.

[19] His family first settled in Fort Indiantown Gap, one of four American camps that accommodated refugees from Vietnam,[23] then moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, until 1978.

[24][25] San Jose, California was the Nguyen family's next destination, where his parents opened a Vietnamese grocery store called SàiGòn Mới,[26] one of the first of its kind in the area.

[37][38] As a child, Viet often enjoyed reading literature about the Vietnam War, preferably those from the Vietnamese perspectives, which were rather rare at the time in comparison with the overwhelming amount of American narratives.

[3] Viet was appointed the 2023 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University and presented a series of six lectures titled To Save and To Destroy: On Writing as an Other.

[16] In addition to teaching and writing, Viet serves as cultural critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times,[51] he is also the founder and editor of diaCRITICS, a blog for the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network.

[63] The novel also made it onto numerous other "Books of the Year" lists, including those of The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

[66] Viet's short fiction has been published in Best New American Voices 2007 ("A Correct Life"),[67] Manoa ("Better Homes and Gardens"),[68][69] Narrative Magazine ("Someone Else Besides You", "Arthur Arellano", and "Fatherland",[70] which was a prize winner in the 2011 Winter Fiction Contest),[71] TriQuarterly ("The War Years" - Issue 135/136), The Good Men Project ("Look At Me"),[72] the Chicago Tribune ("The Americans", also a 2010 Nelson Algren Short Story Awards finalist),[73] and Gulf Coast, where his story won the 2007 Fiction Prize.

[74] In May 2008, Viet is one of the contributing authors of A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross-Cultural Collision and Connection published by OV Books, Other Voices, Inc.[75] In February 2017, Viet continued to collaborate with Grove Press to publish a book of short stories entitled The Refugees.

[84] Viet has also co-edited a treatise entitled Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field along with Janet Hoskins in 2014.

[96][97] Viet is married to Lan Duong, a faculty member in cinema and media studies at USC and a poet, who also grew up in San Jose after coming to the United States as a young refugee.

[100] Viet has also been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2011–2012),[122] the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2008–2009),[48] and the Fine Arts Work Center (2004–2005).