Violet Kupersmith was born in central Pennsylvania in 1989 and later moved with her family to the Philadelphia suburbs. Her father is a white American and her mother is from Da Nang, Vietnam.

Her mother’s family fled the country by boat following the fall of Saigon in 1975, and were resettled in Port Arthur, Texas.

After graduating from Mount Holyoke College in 2011, Violet spent a year teaching English in Tra Vinh, Vietnam, on a Fulbright Fellowship.

Between 2013 and 2015, she lived in Da Lat and Saigon, Vietnam. She was the 2015-2016 David T. K. Wong Fellow at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and is the recipient of a 2022 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.