Photo by Chris Taggart

Tina Chang

Tina Chang was born in 1969 in Oklahoma to Chinese immigrants. She and her family moved to Queens, New York a year later. Chang attended Binghamton University and received her M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University.

Her first book of poetry, Half-Lit Houses (Four Way Books, 2004), was a finalist for an Asian American Literary Award from the Asian American Writers Workshop. She is also the co-editor, with Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008).

She has held residencies at MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Artist's Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Fundacion Valparaiso, Ragdale, Blue Mountain Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has also received awards from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, and the Van Lier Foundation.

Chang was elected Brooklyn Poet Laureate in 2010. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and her new collection of poetry, Of Gods and Strangers, is forthcoming in 2011 from Four Way Books.