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Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the GLCA New Writers Award. In his much anticipated second collection, Your Emergency Contact Is Experiencing An Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022), Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings and the COVID-19 pandemic. Hybrid in form and set in New England, West Texas, and a landlocked province of China, among other places, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency offers an insatiable curiosity about how it is we keep finding ways to hold onto one another.
Brenda Hillman has published more than ten collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press. In Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days (2018); Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013); Practical Water (2009), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), and Cascadia (2001), each book receives her ‘sustained attention’ to one the natural elements. A Publishers Weekly starred review of Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days elucidates, “Having written four previous books each addressing one of the four traditional elements of nature, here she considers wood as a fifth element, making her hieroglyphic way through ‘forests of grief’ as might one of the book’s beloved beetles, ‘pressing/ their whole jeweled bodies/ in the beauty of the bark.’ Neither simply empirical nor transcendental, Hillman’s poetry takes what she calls ‘woodmind’—a sort of deep attention to natural processes—and applies it to notions of human action, recollection, imagination, and craft.” Hillman‘s most recent collection, In a Few Minutes Before Late (2022), is her third book about time; her first book of prose, Three Talks was published by University of Virginia Press in 2024. Author photo by Robert Hass.
