Jennifer S. Cheng received her BA from Brown University, MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa, and MFA in Poetry from San Francisco State University. She is the author of: MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems (2018), selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018”; House A (2016), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize; and Invocation: An Essay (2010), an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, U.S. Fulbright scholar, Kundiman fellow, Bread Loaf work-study scholar, MacDowell fellow, and the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Award, the Ann Fields Poetry Award, the Mid-American Review Fineline Prize, a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poetry, lyric essays, and image-text compositions appear in The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry Magazine, Tin House, Catapult, Lit Hub, Hong Kong 20/20 (a PEN HK anthology), Bettering American Poetry, numerous anthologies, and elsewhere. Having grown up in Texas, Hong Kong, and Connecticut, she lives in rapture of the coastal prairies of northern California.

She is a founding member of The Ruby, a gathering space for women and non-binary artists and writers, as well as a founding editor of Drop Leaf Press, a women-run experiment in textual, tactile objects. Occasionally she teaches creative writing in graduate programs and community settings.

Here is a lyric essay.

Here is something of an ars poetica or theory of aesthetics.

Here is a poem with whales in it.

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{ inventory }: dislocation as location, house/geometry, immigration/emigration, hybridity, liminality, absence as presence, refractive poetics, ghost poetics, connection/disconnection, linguistics, body & landscape, landscape as lover, what the body knows without conscious articulation, bewilderment, wilderness, maps/mapping, myth-making, iteration, the ‘feminine monstrous,’ creation/decreation, opacity, trembling language, textu(r)ality, asemic writing