Poetry Off the Shelf: A Literary ExchangeXi Chuan, Zhou Zan, Li-Young Lee, and Maurice Kilwein Guevara

As part of a national tour presented by Copper Canyon Press, two of China’s leading poets, Zhou Zan and Xi Chuan, join American poets, Li-Young Lee and Maurice Kilwein Guevara, for an evening of bilingual readings and cross-cultural engagement. The event celebrates the publication of Push Open the Window, a contemporary Chinese poetry anthology published in an international literary exchange between the National Endowment for the Arts and the General Administration of Press and Publication in the People’s Republic of China.

Zhou Zan, a native of Jiangsu Province, was born in 1968 and has published poems, criticism, and a translation of Margaret Atwood’s poetry. Editor of the woman’s poetry journal Wings, she was recently a visiting scholar at Columbia University. Xi Chuan was born Liu Jun in 1963, and is the author of many prize-winning collections of poetry, essays, and translations. A past participant in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, and a visiting professor at NYU in 2007, he currently teaches in Peking’s Central Art Academy. Li-Young Lee was born in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1957, the son of Chinese political exiles who eventually immigrated to the United States in 1964. The most recent of his four award-winning collections of poetry is Behind My Eyes. He received the American Book Award for his memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance. Lee now lives with his family in Chicago. Maurice Kilwein Guevara was born in Colombia and raised in Pittsburgh. An accomplished actor and playwright, as well as a founding member of the National Latino Writers’ Association, he has published several collections of poems, including POEMA and Autobiography of So and So: Poems in Prose. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Co-sponsored by Copper Canyon Press, National Endowment for the Arts, and China’s General Administration for Press and Publication

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