Marilyn Chin is the award-winning poet and author of Rhapsody in plain yellow (2003), Hard Love Province (2014), and A Portrait of the Self As Nation (2018), Sage (2023), among others. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon, Chin’s works have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. Contemporary Women Poets essayist Anne-Elizabeth Green observed, “The pains of cultural assimilation infuse [Chin’s] poems.” She is also the author of the novel Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen (2009). In addition to writing poetry and fiction, she has translated poems by the modern Chinese poet Ai Qing and co-translated poems by the Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu.
Chin has read and taught workshops all over the world. Recently, she was guest poet at universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manchester, Sydney, Berlin, Iowa and elsewhere. She’s won numerous awards, including the 2020 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the United Artist Foundation Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, the Anisfield Wolf Book Award, two NEAs, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, five Pushcart Prizes, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan.
She is featured in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century Poetry, and The Best American Poetry.
She is Professor Emerita at San Diego State University and presently serves as a Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets.