Victoria Chang is Winner of the 2014 PEN Center USA Literary Award and the California Book Award!

Three cheers, Victoria! From our friends at Hyphen Magazine:

For poet Victoria Chang, writing is risk-taking. "To be a creative person, you have to take risks all the time," she says during our phone interview. "Everything that you do and every word that you write has to be a risk. You have to not be afraid. You have to keep reinventing your writing."

Chang certainly practices what she preaches, as her third poetry collection, The Boss (2013), presents her most innovative writing yet. Unlike prior works Circle (2005) and Salvinia Molesta (2008) where she tackles a broad range of topics, her most recent collection narrows its focus down to a central speaker coping with the intense pressures of family and corporate responsibilities.

Amid a larger backdrop of world tragedies and natural disasters, the book's speaker struggles to meet her daily duties of motherhood and professional life while also taking care of a father who has fallen victim to stroke-induced aphasia. The poems -- a mix of biographical narrative, meditations, and ekphrasis (through ruminations upon Edward Hopper paintings) -- are driven by heavy language-play and together interrogate notions of power and control.

"Watching my dad go through losing language made me realize how strange and transformative language is -- how close in meaning words can be but how meanings can change so much through small splits of the tongue," says Chang. "Listening to my dad try hard to talk each day and figuring things out through the context of his sentences made me think about the slippage of language and how it twists and turns and changes and morphs and changes again." [...]

Learn more and get into this awesome reading list brought to you by Hyphen. (And Victoria Chang!)