Sze-Lorrain writes mainly in English, and translates from Chinese and French. An editor at Vif Éditions, she has written for venues related to fashion journalism, music and art criticism, and dramaturgy. In 2007, she worked with Gao Xingjian on a book of photography, essays, and poetry based on his film Silhouette/Shadow. Through Mark Strand, whom she would later translate into French, she found her poetic vocation. The Rumpus notes, "As a French woman of post-colonial Asian heritage, she joins a vein of writers such as Marguerite Duras and Samuel Beckett whose work straddles profound cultural complexities. Educated in America, Sze-Lorrain spent several years in New York before settling back in France where she started publishing poems in English, translating French and contemporary Chinese poetry into English, and American poetry into French. Her work serves as a vital midwife for the greater global understanding that will one day be born from today’s contracting and relaxing tensions between differing religions, cultures, and languages." Sze-Lorrain's debut poetry collection, Water the Moon, appeared in 2010, followed by My Funeral Gondola in 2013. Prairie Schooner describes her work as an "arc" that "navigates the sense of otherness" with poems that "burst at the seams with the customs, gastronomy, ancestry, literature, and art of the two cultures." Her third collection The Ruined Elegance was published by Princeton University Press in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2016 and was named one of Library Journal's Best Books in Poetry for 2015. It was also a finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Currently one of the recognized translators of contemporary Chinese poetry, she was shortlisted for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award and longlisted for the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She is a co-founder of Cerise Press and a corresponding editor of Mānoa. The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, Ledig House, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Sze-Lorrain is the inaugural writer-in-residence at MALBA in Buenos Aires. She has also served as a visiting poet at various colleges and universities in United States and Europe. She is a 2019-20 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination. Her poems and translations, handwritten in ink, were exhibited alongside ink drawings by Fritz Horstman from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in the art show, A Blue Dark, at The Institute Library in 2019. As a classical zheng harpist, Sze-Lorrain has performed worldwide. Her concert venues include Carnegie Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, World Music Hall of Wesleyan University, Maison des cultures du monde, Zuiderpershuis Wereldculturen centrum, Rasa Wereldculturencentrum, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Musée Cernuschi, and the Orbigny-Bernon Museum.
Personal life
She lives in Paris with her husband, French publisher Philippe Lorrain.
