River 瑩瑩 Dandelion

River 瑩瑩 Dandelion (he, him, keoi / 佢) is a poet, educator, and healing arts practitioner. He is the author of remembering (y)our light (Dandelion Books, 2023). He received a 2024 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers from Lambda Literary and the 2022 AWP Kurt Brown Prize. He was also a finalist for a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. 

Dandelion earned an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University—Newark, where he served as a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow. He has received fellowships and residences from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Baldwin for the Arts, Kundiman, Lambda Literary, Tin House, Vermont Studio Center, and more. He has spoken, performed, and taught at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, Dodge Poetry Festival, Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, the Museum of the City of New York, Restorative Justice Initiative, Wellesley College, the University of Havana, and more.

As an artist-in-residence at the Pao Arts Center, Dandelion co-curated Homeward Bound: Global Intimacies in Converging Chinatowns, an exhibit derived from his 2016–2017 work as a Knafel Fellow, in which he used photographs, oral histories, and multimedia archives to highlight stories of migration, displacement, and everyday resilience in Chinatowns around the world. He was a contributing editor for the History Channel and a lecturer at Rutgers University—Newark.