Jennifer Chang Reading

The Edelstein-Keller Visiting Writer Series presents the poet and 2026 winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award reading from her work.

Presented by the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English, this in-person event is free and open to the public. No tickets necessary. ASL provided. For further questions about accessibility services and the venue, please email [email protected] or call 612-626-1528. 

Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang is the author most recently of the collection An Authentic Life (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), which won the Kingsley Tufts Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Library of Virginia Award. Her debut, The History of Anonymity (2008), was an inaugural selection for the Virginia Quarterly Review Poetry Series and a finalist for the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. Her second book, Some Say The Lark (Alice James Books, 2017), was longlisted for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award and won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her other honors include the Levinson Prize from Poetry and fellowships from the Elizabeth Murray Artists Residency, MacDowell, and Yaddo. 

Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Poetry. Her scholarly work focuses on the intersection of contemporary and modernist poetics and race, national identity, and the environment. Chang holds a BA from the University of Chicago and earned an MFA and PhD from the University of Virginia. 

Since 2003, Chang has been the co-chair of the advisory board for Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Asian American literature. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. She serves as the poetry editor of New England Review and often teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference.