Jenny Xie

Acclaimed Chinese American Poet
National Book Award Finalist
Walt Whitman Poetry Award-winner

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  • An Evening with Jenny Xie

Biography

“How many lives have been lived inside Jenny Xie’s brief life? I’m guessing the number is staggering, as is the wisdom I find in her remarkable debut. She renders the world with such lyric precision, such a quiet hugeness of spirit, such fresh astonishment. Already I am certain Xie’s is one of the voices that will help me, quite simply, to live.” –Tracy K. Smith

“For a poet so capable of taking readers on far-flung journeys to places like Corfu, Cambodia, and New York, Xie is perhaps most remarkable for her ability to take readers deeper inside themselves than they have ever been. Xie’s work is just a thing of pure, piercing beauty.” – NYLON

“A magician of perspective and scale.” – The New Yorker

Jenny Xie was born in Anhui, China. She is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018) and The Rupture Tense (Graywolf, 2022), both finalists for the National Book Award. Eye Level, selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, was named a recipient of the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University and awarded the Levis Reading Prize; the collection was also a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. The Rupture Tense was a finalist for the National Book Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award. In 2016, Xie’s chapbook Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2016) received the Drinking Gourd Prize.

Reviewing The Rupture Tense for The New York Times, Srikanth Reddy writes, “Xie ingeniously leverages Western prosody to expose the fracture between the “Asian” and “American” aspects of Asian American identity. Her “ragged line” registers the ruptured sovereignty — political and bodily — that convulses her dissociated “you”; the “torturous stitches” that suture one country to another evoke literary hemistitches, or half-lines of poetry, in her broken address to a fugitive ‘we who are made mostly of distance.’”

Xie holds degrees from Princeton University and NYU, and has been supported by fellowships and grants from Kundiman, the Vilcek Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, and New York Foundation of the Arts.

She has taught creative writing at NYU and Princeton University, is currently assistant professor at Bard College. She resides in New York City.

 

Short Bio

​Jenny Xie was born in Anhui province, China. She is the author of Eye Level(Graywolf Press, 2018), a finalist for the National Book Award and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, and The Rupture Tense (Graywolf Press, 2022), a finalist for the National Book Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award. Her chapbook, Nowhere to Arrive(Northwestern University Press, 2017), received the Drinking Gourd Prize. She has been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vilcek Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. She has taught at Princeton and NYU, and is currently assistant professor of Written Arts at Bard College. She lives in New York City.

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