In 2024, Ching-In Chen was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Chen will work with organizations that are part of the local food ecosystem to sponsor a community youth poetry gathering, with a focus on transgender, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-expansive poets. Chen will also solicit work from global poets through other UNESCO Cities of Literature and Gastronomy to share at these gatherings, and will print and distribute poetry postcards featuring these poems alongside the poems by local poets.