Jennifer Chang

Areas of Expertise

Creative Writing (Poetry and Creative Non-Fiction); Poetry and Poetics; Twentieth Century Literature, especially Anglophone and American Modernism; and Transnational Studies 

Professor of English

Current Research

Professor Chang is a poet, essayist, and scholar of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. Her poems consider the intersections of history and the environmental imagination and experiment with ephemeral forms like conversations, letters, and fragments. Her essays range from creative non-fiction to cultural criticism to the researched literary critical essay. Her current poems and essays investigate domestic experiences of war. Her most recent book, Some Say the Lark, was recommended by the Academy of American Poets, the New York Public Library, and Minnesota Public Radio and was widely praised, including a starred review in Publishers Weekly. She is a founding staff member of Kundiman (www.kundiman.org); consults and helps organize the Smithsonian’s bi-annual Asian American Literature Festival; serves on the editorial board of Poetry Daily (poems.com), and also teaches at Bennington College’s low-residency MFA program in Vermont.

Education

PhD, University of Virginia

MFA, University of Virginia

BA, University of Chicago

Publications

Books:

Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books 2017) 

The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press 2008)

Selected Poems in Journals and Anthologies

“We Found the Body of a Young Deer Once” (The New Yorker)

"Lost Child," Boston Review 

“How to Live in an American Town” (Narrative, July 2016)

"Lost Child," Boston Review (forthcoming)

“A Horse Named Never,” Poetry (October 2015)

“Dorothy Wordsworth” Best American Poetry 2012 (Scribners, 2012)

Essays in Journals and Anthologies:

“Watching Badlands in New Jersey” (New England Review, forthcoming)

“On Writing ‘A Horse Named Never,’” Poetry Foundation blog (October 2015)

“Statement of Purpose,” The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, eds. Claudia Rankine, Max Cap King, and Beth Loffreda (Fence Books, 2015)

 “The Public Life of Poetry: A Conversation with Natasha Trethewey,” Los Angeles Review of Books (June 2013)

“On Forgetting and Other Natural Erasures,” The Volta (April 2013)

“How to Read a Prophecy,” Los Angeles Review of Books (July 2012)

Scholarly Publications:

“Asian American Lyric Poetry,” Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, ed. Jennifer Ho (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

“Pastoral and the Problem of Place in Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows,” Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Blackwell, 2015)

Entries on chain rhyme, grammatical rhyme, and internal rhyme in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetic, eds. Stephen Cushman and Roland Greene (Princeton University Press, 2012)

Distinctions

William Carlos Williams Award (2018)

12th Annual Indie Excellence Award Winner (2018)

Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award (2018)

Longlisted for the Julie Suk Award (2018)