S144.
Poets of Chinese Heritage: A Reading
Saturday, March 11, 2023
10:35 am to 11:50 am
A reading by international poets of Chinese heritage, some of multiple ethnicities, who have lived in the UK, USA, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. Poems address the complicated relationship between China and the West, being in conversation with Chinese poetry / texts / literary lineages, writing in English as a second language, facing stereotypes and racialization, and internalized racism, among other topics. Diverse writing styles are included—from formal styles to more abstract work.
Participants
Jay Gao is the author of Imperium, as well as three poetry chapbooks, TRAVESTY58, Katabasis, and Wedding Beasts. He is a contributing editor for The White Review. He earned his MFA in poetry from Brown University, and is an English PhD student at Columbia University.
Wendy Xu’s most recent books of poetry are The Past (2021) and Phrasis (2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, New York Review of Books, Tin House, and widely elsewhere.
Will Harris is a London-based writer of Chinese Indonesian and British heritage. He is the author of Rendang (Wesleyan, 2020), which won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His second book Brother Poem is forthcoming in March 2023.
Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and zinemaker from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently living in the UK. Her debut poetry collection Magnolia 木蘭 was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize. She is also the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons, and a collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water.
Mary Jean Chan is a Hong Kong-Chinese poet, editor, and critic. Their first poetry collection, Flèche, was published by Faber & Faber (2019) and Faber USA (2020). Flèche won the 2019 Costa Book Award in the poetry category. Chan is senior lecturer in creative writing at Oxford Brookes University.
