Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems; and the forthcoming Shiny City as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Massage Parlor Organizing Project core member, Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on the Governing Council of Seattle’s Cultural Space Agency and on the board of Seattle City of Literature. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC, Intercultural Leadership Institute and the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They currently teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell and serve as the poet laureate of Redmond, Washington.

They are currently working on “Breathing in a Time of Disaster,” a community-based performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice. The project aims to tell an interactive story that highlights individual and collective responses to disaster and disrupts mainstream narratives of our changing climate in favor of witnessing creative strategies of survival used by everyday people.

Portrait by Cassie Mira