photo credit: Cassie Mira
Biography
Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi/Red Hen Press, 2009), recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017; winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) and Shiny City (Airlie Press, 2025). They are also the author of chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books, 2019) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2020), which was a Leslie Scalapino Finalist. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice.
A Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, and EmergeNYC Fellow, they have been awarded fellowships from Callaloo, Can Serrat, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Imagining America, EmergeNYC and the Intercultural Leadership Institute. They are a member of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundations writing communities. Chen has also been awarded the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers and served as Hugo House Writer-in-Residence.
Selected to be a member of artEquity's BIPOC Leadership Circle, Chen has been an organizer with Massage Parlor Organizing Project and is a Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on the Governing Council of Seattle's Cultural Space Agency and on board of Seattle City of Literature. Currently a co-lead of the Pacific Northwest chapter of Kundiman and a national board member, they recently co-edited Weave: a zine featuring Kundiman Writers from the Pacific Northwest. They have served as a mentor at Alphabet Alliance of Color's Leadership Institute and at Creature Conserve. They organize with the Reorienting Reads collective to amplify diasporic Asian and Pacific Islander transgender, intersex, nonbinary and gender-expansive voices through community events, educational resources, and publishing projects. Chen is the co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 2011; AK Press, 2016) and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press, 2009).
Chen's writing has been featured at literary readings across the country, including Poets Against Rape, Word from the Streets and the Dodge Poetry Festival. Their work has been published in anthologies and journals including Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation; We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word; Transmasculine Poetics: Filling the Gap in Literature and Silences Around Us; Poetry As Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power; Queer Nature: An Ecoqueer Poetry Anthology; Q&A - Voices from Queer Asian North America; NOMBONO: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators; We Want It All: an Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics; Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and A Face to Meet the Faces: an Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry.
A graduate of Tufts University, they earned an MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside and a PhD at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Chen is currently an associate professor in both the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and in the MFA program in creative writing and poetics at the University of Washington Bothell.
In 2023, Chen was appointed poet laureate of Redmond, Washington, through 2025. In 2024, Chen received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.