Chen Chen is a WRITER, teacher, & editor

His second book, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, is available from BOA Editions and Bloodaxe Books (UK). A finalist for a Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and a best book of 2022 according to the Boston Globe, Electric Lit, NPR, and others, it has also been named a 2023 Notable Book by the American Library Association. His debut, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA, 2017; Bloodaxe, 2019), was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. Chen is also the author of five chapbooks, including Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023), and the forthcoming book of craft essays, In Cahoots with the Rabbit God (Noemi Press, 2025). His work appears in many publications, including Poetry, Poem-a-Day, and three editions of The Best American Poetry (2015, 2019, & 2021). He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists.

He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD from Texas Tech University. He has taught in UMass Boston’s MFA program and at Brandeis University as the 2018-2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. Currently he teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College, Stonecoast, and Antioch. With a brilliant team, he edits the journal Underblong; with Gudetama the lazy egg, he edits the lickety~split. He lives in frequently snowy Rochester, NY with his partner, Jeff Gilbert and their pug, Mr. Rupert Giles.

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Here are some short bios, a long bio, an erasure of Tolstoy, a manifesto of friendship & play, and an ars poetica.

Headshots on the homepage were taken by Paula Champagne at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.