--known about that event.
Tonight, we're delighted to welcome Marilyn Chin.
She was born in Hong Kong, raised in Portland, Oregon,
and is the author of two books of poetry,
Dwarf Bamboo, which was nominated for the Bay Area
Reviewers Award, and The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty,
winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award.
She majored in ancient Chinese literature
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,
received an MFA from the Writers' Workshop at Iowa,
and has held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford
as well as two NEA fellowships.
She was a translator for the International Writing program
at the University of Iowa, where she co-translated the selected
poems of Ai Qing published in 1985 by Indiana University
Press.
In an interview with Bill Moyers for "The Language of Life,"
Chin spoke of her identity as being "non-static,"
as something limitless and always changing.
This fluid sense of identity refers not only
to her individual self, but, to borrow
from the title of one of her most powerful poems,
the self as nation.
In that poem, "A Portrait of the Self as Nation,"
she weaves together with wit and bite the dynamics of dominance
and submission within a sexual relationship,
with those dynamics within cultural relationships.
Her voice can be lyric and focused, defiant, expansive,
passionate, fierce, and, yes, tender.
It's always intense, as if making up
for the lost time of other generations of women
who did not have the benefit of such powers of speech.
Her poems draw subjects from family
and personal relationships, classical Chinese tales
and poetry, and the social/political swirl
of contemporary California.
Assimilation may be her theme, but she never addresses it
with happy melting pot pieties.
Instead, the reader begins to know through her poems
how steep is the price of assimilation,
how political are the bargains one must make with one's heart.
Please welcome Marilyn Chin.
[APPLAUSE]