Dr. Dorothy Chan, English, October 9th, 2024

Dr. Dorothy Chan, associate professor of English, presents, "Return of the Chinese Femme: The Creation of a Poetry Book." Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com.

The speaker in Dorothy Chan’s fifth collection, Return of the Chinese Femme, walks through life fearlessly, “forehead forever exposed,” the East Asian symbol of female aggression. She’s the troublemaker protagonist—the “So Chinese Girl”—the queer in a family of straights— the rambunctious ringleader of the girl band, always ready with the perfect comeback. They indulge on the themes of food, sex, fantasy, fetish, popular culture, and intimacy. Chan organizes the collection in the form of a tasting menu. Triple sonnets, recipe poems, and other inventive plays on diction and form pepper the collection.

Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of five poetry collections, including Return of the Chinese Femme (Deep Vellum, April 2024) and Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), a finalist for the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. They are an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) BIPOC literary arts organization. Chan was a 2022 recipient of the University of Wisconsin System’s Dr. P.B. Poorman Award for Outstanding Achievement on Behalf of LGBTQ+ People. They were a 2024 Visitor at Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Their work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Society of America, and elsewhere.