Jennifer S. Cheng
Photo by Gary Tsang
Bio
Jennifer S. Cheng’s work includes poetry, lyric essay, and image-text forms. She is the author of Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems (2018), a hybrid book adapting Chinese mythologies about women, selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award and named one of Publishers Weekly’s “Best Books of 2018”; House A (2016), a lyrical work about immigrant home-building, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize; and Invocation: an Essay (2011), an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. Her writing appears in Tin House, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hong Kong 20/20 (a PEN HK anthology), and elsewhere.She received fellowships and awards from Brown University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, Mid-American Review, and the Academy of American Poets.
I have been thinking lately about how it is that language came to be my way of reckoning with the world. As a child, I saw that the world was elusive and bewildering. I saw how our immigrant family had our own language, how my parents had theirs, I saw how they did and did not have language depending on who or what surrounded us. Language is violent, oppressive, imperfect, broken, and beautiful. Its various textures permeated my life growing up. And in my childhood places of hiding and hiddenness, there seemed to be a language inside me that was all my own and secret even from myself.
In this world, I am grateful for language as a way of feeling, navigating, and inhabiting that tenuous space between belonging and unbelonging. Every day that I am able to engage with the elusive and bewildering through writing feels like a sacred gift that is both a necessity and a privilege. This fellowship opens up that space for me that much further, and for this I am simply thankful.
