there is no such a thing as loneliness

As the novelist who initiated neorealism in contemporary Chinese literature, Chi Li has won more than eighty literature awards, including the First Luxun Literary Prize (Chinese equivalent to the Pulitzer). Her works have been translated into eight languages—French, English, Spanish, Japanese, German, Korean, Vietnamese, and Thai—and adapted for films, TV shows, theater performances, and operas. She is a household name in China. When her poetry collection, 69 Collected Poems by Chi Li, was released in 2016, it surprised many readers for a good reason: Chi reveals in the epilogue that she started writing poetry when she was around ten. Like air or water, poetry had been what she could not have enough of. Yet, her poems were her “personal items,” not to be shared. These poems are shared the first time in English.

Yuemin He has published on Asian American literature, Buddhist American literature, East Asian literature and visual art, and composition pedagogy. Her translations appear in The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature, Religion and the Arts, Oxford Anthology of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (2nd ed.), Metamorphoses, Ezra, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, and many other places. Currently, she is an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College.