Jennifer Wong

Jennifer Wong is a writer and poet from Hong Kong.^[1]

Biography

Wong studied English literature at University College, Oxford University.^[2] She worked for the Hong Kong government as an administration officer, and later as a PR executive in the private sector.^[3]

She gained an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia,^[4] and a PhD in creative writing at Oxford Brookes University. She taught poetry at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and worked as poet-in-residence at Lingnan University.^[5]

She published her first collection of poems, Summer Cicadas in 2006,^[5] which focused on her time in England.^[6] In 2013 she published her second collection, Goldfish,^[7] which focused more on Hong Kong.^[7] Her third collection, Letters Home^{[8] [9]} published by Nine Arches Press in the UK in 2020, has been named the Wild Card Choice by the Poetry Book Society in the UK.^[10]

In 2014, she received the Hong Kong Young Artist Award (Literary Arts) presented by Hong Kong Arts Development Council.^[11] Her work has been featured in Poetry London,^[12] Poetry Foundation,^[13] Oxford Poetry, Wasafiri,^[14] The Scores,^[15] Washington Square Review,^[16] Tupleo Quarterly, Magma Poetry, The North, World Literature Today,^[17] Wildness,^[18] Asian Cha, Voice & Verse, Lincoln Review^[19] and Finished Creatures. In 2015, she taught creative writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

She is the author of Home, Identity and Writing Elsewhere^[20] published by Bloomsbury in 2023 on the writing identities for Anglophone transnational poets from the contemporary Chinese diaspora. Together with Eddie Tay, she co-edited the new anthology State of Play: Poets of East and Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation^[21] (Outspoken Press, 2023) featuring dialogues between poets of such heritage across continents.

She is a book reviewer and translator, and her work has appeared in Poetry Review, Pathlight, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asian Review of Books and Under the Radar among other publications.

Currently living in the United Kingdom, Wong represented Hong Kong at the Poetry 2012 Cultural Olympiad's Poetry Parnassus.^[22][23] Together with Wasafiri, she co-curated the Poetics of Home poetry festival in 2021.^[24] She worked as writer-in-residence with Wasafiri in 2021. She was a visiting fellow for Oxford TORCH in 2022, producing a transnational anthology on the idea of home and personal history.^[25] She has taught creative writing at Poetry School,^[26] Arvon^[27] and City Lit.

References