Wendy Chen

Wendy Chen received a BA from Wellesley College, an MFA from Syracuse University, and her PhD from the University of Denver.

Chen is the author of the poetry collection Unearthings (Tavern Books, 2018) and the translator of The Magpie at Night: The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao (1084–1151) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). She is also the author of the novel Their Divine Fires (Algonquin Books, 2024).

Chen has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and other institutions. She was the inaugural winner of the 2014 Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank Most Promising Young Poet Award for her poem “They Sail Across the Mirrored Sea.” About the poem, judge Alberto Ríos said:  

This is poetry of genuine maturity, whose imagery and circumstance are constructed from patience, with a particularly demonstrable talent for turning the slowness of this story’s time into vibrant observation and compelling connection—in that way reaching from the depths of the poem out to us who are reading it.

Chen is the editor of the digital poetry journal Figure 1, the associate editor in chief of Tupelo Quarterly, and prose editor for Tupelo Press. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.