Poet Marilyn Chin to visit campus

Marilyn Chin, one of the leading voices of contemporary Asian-American poetry, will give a public reading on Thursday, Feb. 24, at Fresno State. Chin will speak at 7:30 p.m. in the Alice Peters Auditorium in the Peters Business building.

Chin’s poetry is identified with the second decade of Asian-American renaissance that began following the Black Arts movement. Her work is mentioned alongside such writers as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan and Jessica Hagedorn.

Like earlier Asian-American writers like Lawson Fusao Inada and Nellie Wong, Chin is critical of American society’s shortcomings and prejudices. But what makes her different from these earlier writers, according to Fresno State professor Dr. Cheng Lok Chua, is her “highly tuned awareness of Asian events, and her study of classic Chinese texts that has endowed her with a width of allusiveness and profundity of feeling for things Chinese that are rarely equaled.”

Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Oregon and San Francisco. She has published three volumes of poetry: “Rhapsody in Plain Yellow” (2002), “The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty” (1994) and “Dwarf Bamboo” (1987).

She was awarded four Pushcart Prizes, a PEN Josephine Miles Award and a Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. She has also held Fulbright, Stegner, MacDowell and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.

Chin describes her own poetry as “a delicate and apocalyptic melding of East and West.” It’s an exercise that may mean more than a fusion of content but of form as well. Chin says she once combined “the epigrams of Horace and haikus of Basho and came up with a strange brew of didacticism and pure image that made a powerful political statement.”

Many critics agree that Chin’s poetry is political. Chua, an expert on ethnic American literature, describes her as “alert to the sociopolitical events of her times, and always sensitive – even indignant – about the situation of women in their relationships, their families and their societies.”

The event is the second in the San Joaquin Literary Association’s new Visiting Writer Series. The series, sponsored by the Department of English, the College of Arts and Humanities and Associated Students Inc., aims to attract writers and literary figures from across the publishing world to reinforce the importance of literature within the university community. Admission is free.

The event is co-hosted by the SJLA and the MFA Program in Creative Writing. The SJLA is a student organization within the English Department with the intention of creating significant literary events on campus. The group’s next events are March 11 with poet Seido Ray Ronci, and April 28 with poet Krystyna Lenkowska.

For more information contact the English Department at 8-2553.