Lynn Xu

Born in Shanghai, poet Lynn Xu earned a BA from the University of California at Berkeley and an MFA at Brown University.  She received a Catherine and William L. Magistretti Fellowship and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship for her doctoral studies at the University of California at Berkeley. 

Influenced by surrealism, philosophy, and critical theory, Xu composes poems engaged with structure on an intimate level.  Poet Ben Lerner, in his 2010 introduction to Xu’s work in the Boston Review describes Xu as an “expert at multiplying sites of resonance and ambiguity,” praising “Xu’s ability to make the poetic line a little theater where the belatedness of language is felt—and sometimes lulled into suspension.”

Xu is the author of the poetry collections And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight (2022) and Debts & Lessons (2013), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. In 2008 her work was featured in Best American Poetry and, in 2013, she was selected as a New American Poet at the Poetry Society of America. 

An editor for Canarium Books, Xu lives in Marfa, Texas with her husband, the poet, Joshua Edwards.