Wang Ping

Poet, novelist, and artist Wang Ping was born in 1957 in Shanghai, China. She grew up on a small island in the East China Sea. She earned a BA in English from Beijing University before immigrating to the United States in 1985. Ping earned an MA in English from Long Island University and a PhD in comparative literature from New York University. During her undergraduate studies, she lectured in English and Chinese at several Chinese universities and institutes.

She is the author of over 12 books of poetry, prose, and translation, most recently the poetry collection My Name is Immigrant (Hanging Loose, 2020) and the memoir Life of Miracles Along the Yangtze and Mississippi (University of Georgia, 2018), winner of the AWP Creative Nonfiction Award (2017). Ping edited and cotranslated the anthology New Generation: Poetry from China Today (1999). Wang's work is deeply rooted in her Chinese ancestry and identity and addresses the complexities of language, culture, and gender. She has also been featured in several multi-media solo exhibitions, including “We Are Water: Kinship of Rivers” a one-month exhibition that brought 100 artists from the Yangtze and Mississippi Rivers to celebrate water (Soap Factory, 2014), and collaborated with filmmakers and composers on multiple projects. 
 
Wang is the recipient of numerous awards, among them fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the Minnesota Poet Laureate from 2021 to 2023. Wang is the founder of the Kinship of Rivers Project at Macalester College, where she taught creative writing as Professor of English for 21 years and is now a Professor Emerita.