Breath – Ching-In Chen
Dec 23rd, 2020 by Jack Straw
2020 Jack Straw writer Ching-In Chen’s project is a series of experimental prose poems inspired by their relationship to breath, and the Texas Tax Day Flood of 2016. In their conversation with curator Anastacia-Renée, they discuss their process of creating in a hybrid genre, representation in art, and creating within community. “What surprised me is I never knew what people would get out of my work. The people who I never would have imagined would respond to my work, would start talking to me and coming up to me . . . it sparked these conversations with other artists or with community members or, you know, folks.”
Ching-In is a genderqueer Chinese American hybrid writer, community organizer, and teacher. They are author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi/Red Hen Press) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press; winner of 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), as well as the chapbooks how to make black paper sing (speCt! Books, 2019) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and a Finalist for the Leslie Scalapino Award). Chen is also co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 2011; AK Press 2016) and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press, 2009). They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat and Imagining America and are part of Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. They are currently Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Bothell.
SoundPages was produced by Jack Straw Cultural Center as part of the Jack Straw Writers Program. All of the writers heard in this series are published in the Jack Straw Writers Anthology, and featured online at www.jackstraw.org. Music by SassyBlack, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
