Author Reading – Jennifer S. Cheng w/ Jennifer Tseng

JENNIFER S. CHENG writes poetry and lyric essay. Her debut book, HOUSE A, was selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize, and she is the author of the forthcoming hybrid collection MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize, and Invocation: an Essay, an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. Her writing appears in Tin House, Conjunctions, AGNI, The Literary Hub, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, The Normal School, Guernica, Hong Kong 20/20 (a PEN HK anthology), and elsewhere. She was a Fulbright Scholar and received fellowships and awards from Brown University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, Bread Loaf, Kundiman, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas, Connecticut, and Hong Kong, she lives in San Francisco. 

Poet and fiction writer JENNIFER TSENG was born in Indiana and raised in California by a first generation Chinese engineer and a third generation German American microbiologist. Her first book The Man With My Face (AAWW 2005) won the 2005 Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s National Poetry Manuscript Competition and a 2006 PEN American Center Open Book Award. Her second book Red Flower, White Flower (Marick Press 2013), winner of the Marick Press Poetry Prize, features Chinese translations by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen, and her novel Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (Europa Editions 2015) was a finalist for the PEN Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and for the New England Book Award. MAYUMI is available in English, Italian, and Danish.

This is a free event – please RSVP on Eventbrite HERE.

Copies of the authors’ books will be available for purchase at the event.

Light refreshments will be provided by the Jamaica Plain Tuesday Club following the reading and discussions.

Mixing fable and fact, extraordinary and ordinary, Jennifer S. Cheng’s hybrid collection, MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, explores the feminine monstrous as it draws on various Chinese mythologies about women, particularly that of Chang’E (the Lady in the Moon), uncovering the shadow stories of our myths — with the belief that there is always an underbelly. MOON explores bewilderment and shelter, destruction and construction, unthreading as it rethreads, shedding as it collects.