Tina Chang

Tina Chang is an American poet, teacher, and editor.

Life
Chang was born in 1969 in Oklahoma, to Chinese immigrants who had met in Montreal, where her mother was working as a nurse and her father was earning his doctorate in physics. The family moved to New York when she was a year old. She was also raised in New York City. During her young age, Chang and her brother were sent to live in Taiwan with relatives for two years. “I started questioning even at a very young age, well, what is language?” she said. “What is the role of words?”

She later attended Binghamton University. A professor at Binghamton University was the first to say, “I really think that you can be a poet.” in her junior year. She was tickled but unsure what that meant, so she pursued a string of typical English-major jobs: teaching, advertising, publishing. She received her master of fine art's degree in poetry from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she studied with Lucie Brock-Broido, Lucille Clifton, Alfred Corn, Mark Doty and Richard Howard. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and Hunter College.

Along with poets Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, she is the co-editor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, W. W. Norton, 2008. Her new collection of poetry, Of Gods & Strangers, will be published in 2011.

Her work has appeared in numerous journals such as McSweeney's and Ploughshares.

She has held residencies at MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Artist's Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Fundacion Valparaiso, Ragdale, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others.

Recognition
Chang was elected Brooklyn Poet laureate of Brookly, New York, in 2010. She has received grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation/Money for Women, and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Poets & Writers and The Academy of American Poets. She has also won a Dana Award for poetry.

Finalist for an Asian American Literary Award from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, for Half-Lit Houses.

Anthologized

 * Poetry 30: Poets in their Thirties, (MAMMOTH Books, 2005)
 * Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, (University of Illinois Press, 2004)
 * Asian American Literature (McGraw-Hill, 2001)
 * Identity Lessons (Penguin, 1999).