Chen Chen
Chen Chen was born in 1989 in Xiamen, China, and immigrated to the United States as a child, growing up in Massachusetts. He completed his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Syracuse University, and is currently a Kundiman fellow and assistant professor of English at Rice University. He is openly gay, and his identity as a queer Chinese-American immigrant shapes the emotional and political landscape of his poetry with great directness and wit. His work draws on personal history, family dynamics, and the specific textures of queer life to examine questions of belonging, love, and the construction of the self across cultures.
Chen published his debut collection, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, in 2017 with BOA Editions. The book arrived to immediate and widespread acclaim, winning the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and being longlisted for the National Book Award. The poems are formally inventive and tonally varied — moving from elegy to comedy, from intimate address to expansive meditation — and are marked by a willingness to be both structurally ambitious and completely legible, accessible without being simple.
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022), available on WritersReview, confirms Chen as one of the essential poets of his generation. The collection continues his investigation of family, queer love, and the experience of living between cultures, but with a deepened formal range and a darker tonal undertow. The title, borrowed from the impersonal language of administrative bureaucracy, is typical of Chen’s method: finding the emotional charge buried in the flat language of institutions, locating intimacy in the most unlikely formulations. The poems are by turns tender, furious, and funny, and they build toward an understanding of vulnerability as strength.
Chen has also been a prominent voice in conversations about representation in American poetry, about the particular experiences of LGBTQ+ poets of color, and about the relationship between accessibility and ambition in contemporary verse. He has taught widely and mentored many younger writers through organizations including Kundiman, which supports Asian American writers.
His work has been widely anthologized and published in journals including Poetry, Tin House, Gulf Coast, and the Iowa Review. He is one of the most vital and fully achieved voices in American poetry, a writer whose technical skill and emotional intelligence are matched by his commitment to making poetry a space for lives that have too rarely found it.
