“I had forgotten the character
for “love.” I remember vaguely
the radical “heart.”
The ancestors won’t fail to remind you
the vital and vestigial organs
where the emotions come from.”

MARILYN CHIN WRITER POET PERFORMER TEACHER

BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT:

Marilyn Chin is the author of RHAPSODY IN PLAIN YELLOW, DWARF BAMBOO, and THE PHOENIX GONE,THE TERRACE EMPTY. Her newest book of fiction REVENGE OF THE MOONCAKE VIXEN, is hot off the press from W.W.Norton (2009). She was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. She has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the United Artist Foundation Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, two NEAs, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, five Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan, the SeaChange fellowship from the Gaea Foundation, residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Lannan Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation and others… She is featured in a variety of anthologies, includingThe Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry,The Norton Introduction to Poetry, The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Unsettling America,The Open Boat, and The Best American Poetry of l996…etc…She was featured in Bill Moyers’ PBS series The Language of Life. She has read and taught workshops all over the world. Recently, she taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and was guest poet at universities in Beijing, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manchester, Sydney and Berlin and elsewhere. In addition to writing poetry and tales, she has translated poems by the modern Chinese poet Ai Qing and co-translated poems by the Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu. Recently, she was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University. In addition to teaching in the MFA program at San Diego State University, she  also serves as mentor on the international faculty of The City University of Hong Kong’s low residency MFA program, the first of such programs in Asia.