From September 26 @ 8:00 pm – 10:00 pm (UK time)
In Conversation with Dorothy Wang
- Marilyn Chin
- Jane Wong
- Jay Ying
Marilyn Chin, Jane Wong and Jay Ying share and discuss with Prof Dorothy Wang their poetry and approach towards poetic craftsmanship- from the experimental use of forms, the texts and forms that inspire them, to how these poets continue to “break new ground”.
Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. She received a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Chinese literature and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Her most recent book is A PORTRAIT OF THE SELF AS NATION: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (W.W. Norton, 2018). Other books include HARD LOVE PROVINCE, RHAPSODY IN PLAIN YELLOW, DWARF BAMBOO, and THE PHOENIX GONE, THE TERRACE EMPTY, and REVENGE OF THE MOONCAKE VIXEN. Awards include the Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement in poetry, the Anisfield Wolf Book Award, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, two NEAs, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award and others. In 2017, she was honored by the Asian Pacific Islander Caucus and the California Assembly for her activism and excellence in education.
Jane Wong is the author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Jentel Foundation, and others. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.
Jay G Ying is a Chinese-Scottish poet and MFA student at Brown University. His writing has appeared widely, including in Granta, The Guardian, The White Review, The Poetry Review, and 3:AM Magazine. He is the author of two pamphlets: Wedding Beasts (2019) and Katabasis (2020). He is a Contributing Editor for The White Review.
Dorothy Wang’s book Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2013) received the Association for Asian American Studies’ award for best book of literary criticism in 2016 and garnered honorable mention in the Poetry Foundation’s first Pegasus Awards for Criticism in 2014. It was also selected for The New Yorker‘s “The Books We Loved in 2016” year-end list. The first national conference on race and creative writing in the United States was named after Thinking Its Presence. Wang conceived of and co-founded the “Race and Poetry and Poetics in the UK” (RAPAPUK) research initiative and has also published criticism on Asian Australian literature. She has taught as a visiting professor at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and Doshisha University in Kyoto. She is currently Chair of the American Studies Program at Williams College (Massachusetts, USA).