Dorothy Chan (Return of the Chinese Femme) will be at the second annual Brooklyn Poets Poetry Festival!
Folks attending the festival will have two opportunities to catch Dorothy Chan:
Friday, May 24, 4–5:30 PM | Panel: “The Future of the Creative Writing Classroom” with Dorothy Chan, Jay Deshpande, Annie Finch, Dorothea Lasky
For a long time, the poetry “workshop” was an assumption: a given structure with a conventional power dynamic. The writer was supposed to sit in silence and have their poem “fixed” by a teacher with specific bona fides. But what actually makes a workshop work, and how can we imagine better spaces for our poems (and ourselves) to grow? What are we really looking to get out of a workshop, and why? In this panel, veteran instructors will think collectively about their experiences teaching poetry in both academic and non-conventional environments. They’ll discuss the strengths and deficits of the traditional workshop model and introduce other forms of pedagogy that have helped them as teachers and as writers. Attendees will also learn some of the key things they can do as students to enrich their own workshop experiences.
Friday, May 24, 7:30-8:30 PM | Evening reading: Rosebud Ben-Oni, Dorothy Chan, Annie Finch, Karl Michael Iglesias, dawn lonsinger, Ramya Ramana
About Return of the Chinese Femme:
An unabashed exploration of queerness, excess, identity, and tenderness from award-winning poet Dorothy Chan.
The speaker in Dorothy Chan’s fifth collection, Return of the Chinese Femme, walks through life fearlessly, “forehead forever exposed,” the East Asian symbol of female aggression. She’s the troublemaker protagonist—the “So Chinese Girl”—the queer in a family of straights— the rambunctious ringleader of the girl band, always ready with the perfect comeback, wearing a blue fur coat, drinking a whiskey neat. They indulge on the themes of food, sex, fantasy, fetish, popular culture, and intimacy.
Chan organizes the collection in the form of a tasting menu, offering the reader a taste of each running theme. Triple sonnets, recipe poems, and other inventive plays on diction and form pepper the collection. Amidst the bravado, Return of the Chinese Femme represents all aspects of her identity—Asian heritage, queerness, kid of immigrants’ story—in the most real ways possible, conquering the world through joy and resilience.
Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of multiple poetry collections, including BABE (Diode Editions, 2021), Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). They were a 2023 finalist for the Roethke Poetry Award for Revenge of the Asian Woman, 2022 finalist for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club for BABE, a 2020 and 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry for Revenge of the Asian Woman, and a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Their work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere.
Chan is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Book Reviews Co-Editor of Pleiades, and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) BIPOC literary arts organization, run by women, femme, and queer editors of color. Chan was the 2021 Resident Artist for Toward One Wisconsin. They were a 2022 recipient of the University of Wisconsin System’s Dr. P.B. Poorman Award for Outstanding Achievement on Behalf of LGBTQ People.