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Marilyn Chin
Born	Mei Ling Chin 1955 Hong Kong;
Occupation	Writer
Language	English
Citizenship	USA
Alma mater	University of Iowa
Website
www.marilynchin.org

Marilyn Chin (陈美玲) is a prominent Chinese American poet, writer, activist, and feminist, as well as an editor and Professor of English. She is well-represented in major canonical anthologies and textbooks and her work is taught all over the world. Marilyn Chin's work is a frequent subject of academic research and literary criticism. Marilyn Chin has read her poetry at the Library of Congress.

Life

She grew up in Portland, Oregon, after her family emigrated from Hong Kong. She received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and a B.A. from University of Massachusetts Her poetry focuses on social issues, especially those related to Asian American feminism and bi-cultural identity.

Marilyn Chin has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the United Artists Foundation Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, the SeaChange fellowship from the Gaia Foundation, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, five Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

She is featured in several authoritative anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Unsettling America, The Open Boat and The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry.

She was interviewed by Bill Moyers and featured in his PBS series "The Language of Life." Her poem “The Floral Apron” was introduced by Garrison Keillor on the PBS special “Poetry Everywhere."” It was also chosen by the BBC to represent the region of Hong Kong during the 2012 Olympics in London.

Marilyn Chin is professor emerita at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. In January 2018, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Awards and honors

• 2020 Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
• 2019 The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature
• 2018 Academy of American Poets Chancellor
• 2014 California Book Awards Poetry Finalist for "Hard Love Province"
• Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard
• Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio
• Two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships
• 2007 United States Artists Fellowship
• The Stegner Fellowship
• Five Pushcart Prize
• Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan
• The SeaChange Fellowship from the Gaea Foundation
• 1995 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award

Residencies

• Civitella Ranieri Foundation
• Yaddo
• MacDowell Colony
• Lannan Foundation
• Djerassi Foundation

Selected bibliography

Poetry

• Dwarf Bamboo Greenfield Review Press, 1987, ISBN 978-0-912678-71-9
• The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty Milkweed Editions, 1994, ISBN 978-0-915943-87-6; Milkweed Editions, 2009, ISBN 978-1-57131-439-0
• Rhapsody in Plain Yellow: Poems W. W. Norton & Company, 2003, ISBN 978-0-393-32453-2
• Hard Love Province: Poems W. W. Norton & Company, 2014, ISBN 978-0-393-24096-2
• A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems W. W. Norton & Company, 2018, ISBN 978-0-393-65217-8

Fiction

• Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. W. W. Norton & Company. 2009. ISBN 978-0-393-07727-8.

Edited Anthologies

• Victoria M. Chang, ed. (2004). "Forward". Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-07174-4.
• Ken Weisner; Marilyn Chin; David Wong Louie, eds. (1991). Dissident Song: A Contemporary Asian Anthology. Quarry West.

Translations

• Ai Qing (1985). The Selected Poems of Ai Qing. Translated by Marilyn Chin and Eugene Eoyang.
• Yoshimasu Gozo (1980). Devil's Wind: A Thousand Steps or More. Translated by Marilyn Chin. Oakland University.

Scholarship

Chin's work is the subject of a number of scholarly essays. A recent one explores the ironic voices in "Rhapsody in Plain Yellow" that challenge self-hatred and self colonization.

References

1. Gery, John (April 2001). "Mocking My Own Ripeness: Authenticity, Heritage, and Self-Erasure in the Poetry of Marilyn Chin". LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory (12): 25–45.
2. Dorothy Wang (2013). "Chapters 3 and 4". Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-8365-1. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
3. Mc Cormick, Adrienne (Spring 2000). "'Being Without': Marilyn Chin's 'I' Poems as Feminist Acts of Theorizing". Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism. 6 (2): 37–58.
4. Allison Marion, ed. (2002). Poetry Criticism. Vol. 40. reprint of ‘Being Without’. Gale Group. pp. 18–27.
5. Catherine Cucinella (2010). "Writing the Body Palimpsest". Poetics of the Body: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Chin, and Marilyn Hacker. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-62088-9.
6. Anastasia Wright Turner (2013). "Marilyn Chin's Dialectic of Chinese Americanness". In Cheryl Toman (ed.). Defying the Global Language: Perspectives in Ethnic Studie. Teneo Press. ISBN 978-1-934844-84-7.
7. Steven G. Yao (2010). "Are You Hate Speech or are You a Lullaby?". Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity. Global Asias Series. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-973033-9.
8. Hsiao, Irene (Fall 2012). "Broken Chord: Sounding Out the Ideogram in Marilyn Chin's Rhapsody in Plain Yellow". MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 37 (3): 25–45. doi:10.1353/mel.2012.0046. S2CID 161068535. Retrieved April 1, 2018.
9. "Marilyn Chin is a "Witness to History" | From the Catbird Seat: Poetry & Literature at the Library of Congress". blogs.loc.gov. Rizzo, Caitlin. 2013-04-25. Retrieved 2018-03-25.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
10. Poets.org
11. Cheung, King-Kok (2014). "Slanted Allusions: Transnational Poetics and Politics of Marilyn Chin and Russell Leong" (PDF). Positions: Asia Critique. 22: 237–262. doi:10.1215/10679847-2383903. S2CID 145194907.
12. "Chin, Marilyn". Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature. Infobase Publishing. 2009. p. 107. ISBN 978-1-4381-0910-7.
13. Voices from the Gaps Biography
14. Ramazani, Jahan; O'Clair, Robert; Ellmann, Richard (2003). The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 2 (3rd ed.). ISBN 0-393-97792-7.
15. Gilbert, Sandra M.; Gubar, Susan (2007). The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English. Vol. 2 (3rd ed.). ISBN 978-0-393-93014-6.
16. "Watch Bill Moyers: The Language of Life | Prime Video". www.amazon.com.
17. "Marilyn Chin | Poetry Everywhere | PBS". www.pbs.org.
18. ^ "Marilyn Chin" Poets.org
19. "2020 Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize". 30 May 2021.
20. "2019 Literature Award Winners – American Academy of Arts and Letters". artsandletters.org.
21. Poets, Academy of American. "Marilyn Chin, Kwame Dawes, and Marie Howe Named Academy of American Poets Chancellors | poets.org". poets.org.
22. "California Book Awards". Commonwealth Club.
23. "Civitella Ranieri". 5 December 2018.
24. "12 Poetry Books To Diversify National Poetry Month". Bustle.

External links

External media
Audio
The poem 'Blues on Yellow' from Rhapsody in Plain Yellow
An excerpt from Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen
Video
The poem 'The Floral Apron' at Poetry Everywhere on YouTube
The poem 'Barbarian Sweet' at UCTV

• Marilyn Chin's Official Website
• Essay by Chin on American Poetry
• Parmar, Nissa (November 2014). ""Double Happiness": an interview with Marilyn Chin". Contemporary Women's Writing. 8 (3). Oxford Journals: 251–261. doi:10.1093/cww/vpu012.
• Chin's Profile at Modern American Poetry
• Academy of American Poets

• American writers of Chinese descent
• Living people
• 1955 births
• Hong Kong poets
• American feminists
• Poets from Oregon
• University of Iowa alumni
• American women poets
• PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award winners
• Writers from Portland, Oregon
• 21st-century American women writers
• Hong Kong women activists
• 21st-century American poets
• San Diego State University faculty
• Hong Kong women writers
• Hong Kong emigrants to the United States
• Activists from Oregon