POET

Marilyn Chin (1955 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Portland, Oregon, and her work reflects her Asian American heritage. Her collections of poetry include Dwarf Bamboo (1987); The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (1999), winner of the PEN Josephine Miles Award; and Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (2002). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University, and several Pushcart Prizes.

Of her writing, Chin explained that she works toward “a delicate and apocalyptic melding of East and West.” This combining of cultures often manifests in Chin’s willingness to mix poetic forms. In Contemporary Women Poets, Anne-Elizabeth Green wrote of Chin’s first two collections that she “struggles passionately and eloquently in the pull between the country left behind and America—the troubled landscape that is now home.”

Chin was a translator at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and is co-translator with Pen Wenlan and Eugene Euyang of Selected Poems of Ai Qing (1982). She co-edited Writing from the World (1985) and Dissident Song: A Contemporary Asian American Anthology (1991).

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Chin explained, “I see myself and my identity as nonstatic. I see myself as a frontier, and I see my limits as limitless. . . . I’m thoroughly bicultural and bilingual.”

Chin has taught in Taiwan as a Fulbright professor; in Sydney, Australia, as a visiting professor; and at San Diego State University.