Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang has received degrees from the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Stanford University, as well as an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

Chang is the author of With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), winner of the 2024 Forward Prize for Best Collection; The Trees Witness Everything, (Copper Canyon Press, 2022), which was named one of the Best Books of 2022 by The New Yorker and the Guardian; Dear Memory (Milkweed, 2021); OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), a National Book Award nominee and winner of the 2018 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Award; Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon Press, 2017); The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013), winner of a PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award; Salivinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press, 2008); and Circle (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005).

Chang is also the author of the middle-grade novel-in-verse Love, Love (Sterling Children’s Books, 2020) and the picture book Is Mommy? (Beach Lane Books, 2015), illustrated by Marla Frazee, as well as the editor of the anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2004).

Of her work, Ilya Kaminsky writes,

To say simply that Chang takes the Modernist’s music and makes it new again, makes it alive, is to say only half-truth, for she truly re-inhabits it, rekindles the flame. This radically new music is political, yes, but it is also ecstatic.

Chang, who received a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2023 Chowdhury Prize in Literature, served as a contributing editor of Copper Nickel and On the Seawall and poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine and Tupelo Quarterly. Chang was the Poem-a-Day Guest Editor for May 2019. She lives in Los Angeles.