Marilyn Chin
Quick Facts
Biography
Marilyn Chin (陈美玲) is a prominent Chinese American poet and writer, an activist and feminist, an editor and Professor of English. She is well-represented in major canonical anthologies and textbooks and her work is taught all over the world. Marilyn Chin's work is a frequent subject of academic research
and literary criticism. Marilyn Chin has read her poetry at the Library of Congress
Life
She grew up in Portland, Oregon, after her family emigrated from Hong Kong. She received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and a B.A. from University of MassachusettsHer poetry focuses on social issues, especially those related to Asian Americanfeminism and bi-cultural identity.
Marilyn Chin has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the United Artists Foundation Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, the SeaChange fellowship from the Gaia Foundation, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, five Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
She is featured in several authoritative anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Unsettling America, The Open Boat and The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry.
She was interviewed by Bill Moyers and featured in his PBS series "The Language of Life." Her poem “The Floral Apron” was introduced by Garrison Keillor on the PBS special “Poetry Everywhere."” It was also chosen by the BBC to represent the region of Hong Kong during the 2012 Olympics in London.
Marilyn Chin is a Full Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University where she teaches in the MFA program.
Awards and honors
- 2014 California Book Awards Poetry Finalist for "Hard Love Province"
Selected bibliography
- Poetry
- Dwarf Bamboo Greenfield Review Press, 1987, ISBN 9780912678719
- The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty Milkweed Editions, 1994, ISBN 9780915943876; Milkweed Editions, 2009, ISBN 9781571314390
- Rhapsody in Plain Yellow W. W. Norton & Company, 2003, ISBN 9780393324532
- Hard Love Province W. W. Norton & Company, June 8, 2014, ISBN 9780393240962
- Fiction
- Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. W. W. Norton & Company. 2009. ISBN 9780393077278.
- Edited Anthologies
- Victoria M. Chang, ed. (2004). "Forward". Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252071744.
- Ken Weisner; Marilyn Chin; David Wong Louie, eds. (1991). Dissident Song: A Contemporary Asian Anthology. Quarry West.
- Translations
- Ai Qing (1985). The Selected Poems of Ai Qing. Translated by Marilyn Chin and Eugene Eoyang.
- Yoshimasu Gozo (1980). Devil’s Wind: A Thousand Steps or More. Translated by Marilyn Chin. Oakland University.