Tina Chang

Chang co-hosting the 2010 Best of Brooklyn Award.

Tina Chang is an American poet, teacher, and editor. She is currently (2010) Poet Laureate of Brooklyn.

Life

Chang was born in 1969 in Oklahoma, to Chinese immigrants, who had met in Montreal, where her mother was working as a nurse and her father was earning his doctorate in physics. The family moved to New York when she was a year old. She was also raised in New York City. During her young age, Chang and her brother were sent to live in Taiwan with relatives for two years. “I started questioning even at a very young age, well, what is language?” she said. “What is the role of words?”

She later attended Binghamton University. A professor at Binghamton University was the first to say, “I really think that you can be a poet.” in her junior year. She was tickled but unsure what that meant, so she pursued a string of typical English-major jobs: teaching, advertising, publishing. She received her master of fine art's degree in poetry from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she studied with Lucie Brock-Broido, Lucille Clifton, Alfred Corn, Mark Doty and Richard Howard. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and Hunter College.

Along with poets Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, she is the co-editor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, W. W. Norton, 2008. Her latest collection of poetry, Of Gods & Strangers, was published October 2011.

Her work has appeared in numerous journals such as McSweeney's and Ploughshares.

She has held residencies at MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Artist's Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Fundacion Valparaiso, Ragdale, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others.

Awards

Chang was elected Brooklyn Poet Laureate in 2010. She has received grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation/Money for Women, and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Poets & Writers and The Academy of American Poets. She has also won a Dana Award for poetry.

Finalist for an Asian American Literary Award from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, for Half-Lit Houses.

Books

• Half-Lit Houses. Four Way Books. May 2004. ISBN 978-1-884800-52-8. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

• Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond. W. W. Norton. May 2008. ISBN 0-393-33238-1. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

• Of Gods & Strangers. Four Way Books. May 2011. ISBN 1-935536-17-6. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

Anthologies

• Poetry 30: Poets in their Thirties, (MAMMOTH Books, 2005)
• Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, (University of Illinois Press, 2004)
• Asian American Literature (McGraw-Hill, 2001)
• Identity Lessons (Penguin, 1999).

External links

• Homepage for Tina Chang
• Audio recording: Tina Chang at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2008
• A Poet Who Doesn't Do Lofty, The New York Times
• Why I Write, Publishers Weekly
• Poetry Society of America, Q & A: American Poetry
• Official Press Release, BP Markowitz Names Tina Chang of Park Slope as Poet Laureate of Brooklyn
• Brooklyn's New Poet Laureate Wants to Weave Poetry into Residents' Lives
• Brooklyn Poet Laureate Envisions Outreach into Brooklyn Communities
• From the Fishouse, audio recordings of Tina Chang's poems
• Interview with Li-Young Lee
• drunkenboat.com, audio recordings of Tina Chang's poems
• New York Times, Princeton Poetry Festival
• "Strange Theater"; "Wild Invention"; "Imagine, Refugee", Guernica, November 2007
• "Duality", Poets.org