Jenny Xie is a New York City-based writer and educator. She is the author of two poetry collections, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018) and The Rupture Tense (Graywolf Press, 2022), and the chapbook Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Her work has been supported through fellowships and grants from Kundiman, New York Foundation of the Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Vilcek Foundation. She is an Assistant Professor of Written Arts at Bard College.
FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT
My work charts cross-cultural connections and dislocations, while tracing the enmeshed nature of seeing and of being seen. I’m invested in the concept of opacity: the right to be unknowable—and unmarketable—and the implications of being a site of continually shifting contradictions and unstatic experience.
Recently, my poems have been driven by slippages and scramblings in tenses—when the past ruptures into the present, or when the future leaks into the past—and by forms of historical, collective, and personal memory and postmemory that warp, stain, disfigure, and erode.
I strive to create work that demonstrates the vital force unassimilated language can have, of the power and charge that can pulse through words when they behave differently, against rules and convention, and against forces that collude to render language more utilitarian, more homogenous, and free of nuance and rich complexity.