Please join us at Women & Children First (Chicago) for an in-person poetry reading celebrating Return of the Chinese Femme by Dorothy Chan. Dorothy will be joined by fellow Deep Vellum poet S. Yarberry.
Pre-registration for this event is required. By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.
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 five poetry collections, including Return of the Chinese Femme (Deep Vellum, April 2024) and Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), a finalist for the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. They are an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) BIPOC literary arts organization. Chan was a 2022 recipient of the University of Wisconsin System’s Dr. P.B. Poorman Award for Outstanding Achievement on Behalf of LGBTQ+ People. This past summer, they were a Visitor at Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Chan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com.
S. Yarberry is a trans poet and writer. Their poetry has appeared in Tin House, Indiana Review, The Offing, Berkeley Poetry Review, jubilat, Notre Dame Review, The Boiler, miscellaneous zines, among others. Their other writings can be found in Bomb Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. They currently serve as the Poetry Editor of The Spectacle. S. has their MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and is now a PhD candidate in literature at Northwestern University. Their book A Boy in the City was published by Deep Vellum in 2022.
Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.