Phan Lê Hà graduated from Vietnam National University and received her PhD from Monash University (Australia) in 2005. Before her current posts as Full Professor at the University of Hawaii  at Manoa, Honolulu, U.S.A and Senior Professor at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei, she lectured at Monash University for nearly a decade. She is also on the Editorial Board of reputable international peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Language and Education and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Phan Lê Hà founded Engaging with VietNam in 2009 while at Monash. In 2011, Professor Liam Kelley from the Department of History, University of Hawaii at Manoa joined EWV as a co-founder, and both of them have been building EWV since then. Alongside her academic work and service to community, Phan Lê Hà also writes poetry and literary works. She tells her thoughts, contemplation and observations of everything inside her and around her in stories, poetry and free-style poetic lines. She enjoys bringing poetry and stories into her teaching and academic writing. Phan Lê Hà’s poems and narratives convey her observations and feelings about life, love, an artist’s calling, and about the empathy she finds in the complexity of life and in the many personal struggles of others that she has encountered in many situations and on her journeys.