Chen Chen’s second book of poems, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, was published in 2022 by BOA Editions. It was a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, a Notable Book of the American Library Association, and a best book of 2022 according to the Boston Globe, Electric Lit, NPR, and others. His debut, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award and the GLCA New Writers Award, among other honors. His UK/international publisher is Bloodaxe Books. He is also the author of five chapbooks, most recently Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023). His first book of essays, In Cahoots with the Rabbit God, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2025. And he is represented by Hafizah Geter of Janklow & Nesbit for a memoir project.

Chen’s work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Poem-a-Day, and The New York Tmes. His work is widely anthologized—these volumes include 100 Poems That Matter, 100 Queer Poems, Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, Bettering American Poetry, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best of the Net, and three editions of The Best American Poetry (2015, 2019, 2021). His poems have been translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Russian, and Spanish.

He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. He has also received fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, Lambda Literary, the Saltonstall Foundation, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Tent: Creative Writing. He was a twice finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships (2015 and 2020). He won the 2015 Matt Clark Editors’ Choice Award from New Delta Review. Poets & Writers featured him in their Inspiration Issue as one of “Ten Poets Who Will Change the World" and The Atlantic featured him in an article entitled “How Poetry Came to Matter Again.“ He has been a featured poet at schools, festivals, and conferences across the nation and abroad in the UK and New Zealand.

As an editor, he has worked on Salt Hill, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Gabby Journal. He has also guest-edited or judged for several journals. With his best friend, Sam Herschel Wein, he co-founded Underblong, a journal dedicated to the queer and magique; he edits it alongside Sam and a brilliant team. With Gudetama the Lazy Egg he edits the Twitter-based journal of short poems, the lickety~split.

He holds an MFA from Syracuse University, where he was a University Fellow, and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Texas Tech University, where he received a J.T. and Margaret Talkington Fellowship and won the Warren S. Walker Award for Best Critical Writing.

He has taught for Writers & Books in Rochester, NY; Tulsa Glitterary’s LGBTQ+ Writers Conference; Winter Tangerine guest seminars online and at Poets House; and The Watering Hole Retreat in McCormick, SC. He has been an online instructor for Tin House, the Speakeasy Project, Catapult, Hugo House, Kundiman, Ellipsis, The Adroit Journal’s Summer Mentorship Program, Asian American Writers’ Workshop; and others. He taught creative writing at Brandeis University as the 2018-2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. He regularly teaches for the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and the Fine Arts Work Center. He is poetry faculty for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College, Stonecoast, and Antioch.

Whenever possible, he would like to have long, beautiful conversations about Tuxedo Mask. He resides in frequently snowy Rochester, NY, where he was voted Best Published Poet in 2023. He lives with his partner, Jeff Gilbert, and their pug, Mr. Rupert Giles.