Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang was born in New Jersey. She is a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, where she is a PhD candidate. Chang’s lyrical poems often explore the shifting boundaries between the outer world and the self. Chang’s debut poetry collection, The History of Anonymity (2008), was selected for the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Shenandoah/ Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. Speaking to the “emotional landscapes” of myths and fairy tales that surface occasionally in her poems, Chang stated in a 2008 interview on Critical Mass (the blog of the National Book Critics Circle board of directors): “As a scholar, I don’t trust autobiography, and as a lyric poet, I don’t trust narrative: both enforce a coherence that reveals more about the writer’s motives at the moment rather than the life or story being told. What I do trust is mystery; I trust confusion.”Chang co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the support and promotion of Asian American poetry. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Living Writers is a series of events that are free to students and the public, and happens every Thursday night from 6-7:45pm in the Humanities Lecture Hall, room 206. This series will be focusing on fiction writers as well as filmmakers. It’s going to be an exciting series and we hope to see you there!  For more details, please email us at cwintern@gmail.com

10/13 experimental memoirist Michelle Tea, author most recently of the apocalyptic memoir Black Wave

10/20 novelist Alfredo Vea, author most recently of The Mexican Flyboy, about a Latino super hero who goes back in time to save historical heroes from painful deaths

10/27 poet and Pulitzer prize finalist Elizabeth Willis

11/10 fiction and non-fiction writer Peter Orner, author most recently of Am I Alone Here, a memoir-essay hybrid about living to read/reading to live

Readings sponsored by The Humanities Division, The Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, The Literature Department and Poets and Writers Inc.