Tina Chang


Tina Chang is an American poet, teacher, and editor. In 2010, she was named Poet Laureate of Brooklyn.

Early life

Chang was born in 1969 in Oklahoma to Taiwanese immigrants, who had met in Montreal, where her mother was working as a nurse and her father was earning his doctorate in physics. The family moved to Queens, New York, when she was a year old, where she was raised except for a period during her youth, when Chang and her brother were sent to live in Taiwan with relatives for two years. “I started questioning even at a very young age, well, what is language?” she said. “What is the role of words?”
She later attended Binghamton University. She received her master of fine art's degree in poetry from Columbia University.

Career

Chang will serve as Director of Creative Writing at Binghamton University starting fall, 2020.
Along with poets Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, she is the co-editor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, W. W. Norton, 2008. Her latest collection of poetry, Hybrida, was published in May 2019 by W. W. Norton.
Her work has appeared in numerous publications such as The New York Times, McSweeney's, and Ploughshares. The San Francisco Chronicle has described her poetry as “a vast, beautifully fashioned mosaic of indelible, variegated pieces.” One of her chief goals is to “demystify the role of the poet.”
She has held residencies at MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Artist's Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Fundacion Valparaiso, Ragdale, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Awards

Chang was elected Brooklyn Poet Laureate in 2010. She has received grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation/Money for Women, and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Poets & Writers and The Academy of American Poets. She has also won a Dana Award for poetry. She was a finalist for an Asian American Literary Award from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, for Half-Lit Houses

Books

Anthologies