By Ching-In Chen When I hurt, I work. When I feel undermined or disrespected, I channel those feelings into more work, as if producing more could earn others’ respect. I place an impossible expectation on myself — to be a perfect teacher (making no mistakes!), perfect writer (no typos or underthought phrases!) and perfect community member (missing no community meetings or events!). When I first read Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun’s framework for the…
All posts by Ching-In Chen
About Ching-In Chen
Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American hybrid writer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic and recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award winner for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks how to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Award Finalist). Chen is also co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat and Imagining America and are part of Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. A community organizer, they worked in Asian American communities in San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside, Boston, Milwaukee and Houston. They are currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell.