Michael Chang : part one

A Lambda Literary fellow, Michael Chang (they/them) was awarded the Kundiman Scholarship at the Miami Writers Institute in addition to fellowships from Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, & the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Their writing has been published or is forthcoming in the Cincinnati Review, Summerset Review, Vassar Review, Minnesota Review, Santa Clara Review, Ninth Letter, Hobart, Harpur Palate, Poet Lore, The Nervous Breakdown, & many others. Their collection <golden fleece> was a finalist for the Iowa Review Award in Poetry; another collection <失恋王> was a finalist in the BOMB Magazine Poetry Contest.

What are you working on?

I have a lot going on!  I am doing a fiction workshop with Bryan Washington as part of the Miami Writers Institute.  I am this year’s Kundiman Scholar, so I am very grateful to Kundiman and the Miami Book Fair for inviting me to participate.

I am also taking a terrific course with Cooper Lee Bombardier called “Queer Bodies/Queer Forms.”  This was again made possible thanks to a full-tuition scholarship.  I am eternally grateful.

I am refining and will be teaching a course called Politics, Desire, and the Politics of Desire.  It’s going to be an exciting ride, so stay tuned for that.  I cover coming-of-age, gender & sexuality, family, food, the political, sex & shame, myth-making . . . it will be great fun to share my passions with folks.

I am moreover working on a full-length poetry manuscript that serves both as a love letter to America and an attempt to hold America to account.  It really challenges impressions of what a queer, gender non-conforming, Azn writer should and can write about.  It is a reckoning with America, boldly standing for the proposition that if you love something, it is your obligation and imperative to critique it.

Looking ahead, I will continue to riff on core themes of Americana, rebuilding our country in a post-Trump era, and—most importantly—unabashed self-love.  In calling forth a new America, we won’t apologize.