Writer’s Craft – SASFest—CHEN CHEN

Though perhaps the love poem has long been queer (think of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Sappho’s fragments), in this generative session we’ll discuss contemporary examples that further (or differently) queer and complicate the love poem—and indeed, love itself. How can a love poem also be a political poem? A protest poem? Or a political poem for how it reimagines relationships of all kinds? A queer love poem may be about a speaker and a beloved (or beloveds), but it may also be about friendship, community, family both blood and chosen, self-love, caring for the planet, and speaking back to the social systems that limit agency, that attempt to erase queerness. We’ll read work by Essex Hemphill, Natalie Diaz, Jericho Brown, Charif Shanahan, Muriel Leung, Justin Chin, F. Douglas Brown, Yanyi, and others as models for our own writing from and into queerer forms of love.

Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors.