Awards/Fellowships
- 2nd Place Best Feature Story Louisiana Press Association 2024 – My story about a kid umpire won 2nd place state wide
- The O’neill’s National Critics Institute Fellow 2024 – I was selected as one of 17 fellows to participate in an intensive two weeklong criticism workshop centered on theater.
- The Scot Haller Prize recognizes the most outstanding stories published by the Yale Daily News every year. My story about Yale’s leave and withdrawal policy received 2nd place in 2022.
- AAJA Voices selects a cohort of young Asian journalists each year for an intensive summer training program. I was selected for the audio cohort, and I presented my project at AAJA 2022. The story was about accentism/discrimination faced by non-Western teachers of English in Asia.
Appearances
- Louisiana Book Festival 2025 – moderator of two panels:
- Remembering, Reimagining, Becoming: Vietnamese Identity 50 Years After the War – Acclaimed author and co-editor Thi Bui and artist Sam Nga Blum discuss the evolution of Vietnamese diaspora identity with journalist Serena Puang. Using Bui’s memoir, The Best We Could Do, as a touchstone for remembering the refugee experience, they will explore how contemporary writers and artists—as seen in the experimental and wide-ranging McSweeney’s 78: The Make Believers—are now actively reimagining and creating a new, eclectic cultural language for what it means to be becoming Vietnamese in the world today.
- Fiction After the End: Building, Surviving, and Seeing the World Anew – featuring Eiren Caffall, “All the Water in the World: A Novel,” Malaika Favorite, “After Color” and Joshua Wheeler, “The High Heaven: A Novel“
- Drew Barrymore Show – played a clip from one of my TikToks about Olive Garden Soup which you can order by the bucket.
- Louisiana Book Festival (2024) – moderator of two panels: Past and present romance fiction and The Weight –– and promise of family legacies: fiction.
- The Yalie (2022) – I was invited to speak on my award-winning investigation about Yale’s leave and withdrawal policy and the investigations desk I helped edit my junior year at Yale.
- Baggage Check (2022) – licensed clinical psychologist, best-selling author and popular psychology professor Dr. Andrea Bonior’s show Baggage Check unpacks mental health, relationships, stress and work. We chatted about my New York Times article about aphantasia, what I’ve learned since writing it, and what we as a society can be doing better for neurodivergent folks.
If you’d like to interview me about my work, please get in touch! You can shoot me a message through this contact form or write to contact [at] dearyall [dot] net
Serena elsewhere
- Merriam-Webster dictionary has a sentence from my NYT article as a sample sentence!
