Interview with Ching-In Chen

Waves Breaking

This month I had the pleasure of interviewing Ching-In about their recent publication, recombinant. We got to talk about archive, language, history, and gender.

Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press; AK Press) and Here is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press). A Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole and Callaloo Fellow, they are part of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. Their work has appeared in The Best American Experimental Writing, The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. They are a senior editor of The Conversant and poetry editor of the Texas Review. They serve on the Executive Board of Thinking Its Presence: Race, Advocacy, Solidarity in the Arts as the Director of Membership and Social Media. www.chinginchen.com

Have a listen, spread the word!

Artists and works mentioned in this episode:

• Ching-In's book recombinant
• Ching-In's book The Heart's Traffic
• The Peabody Essex Museum's collected artifacts of the basket and fan
• Milwaukee lynch mob information
• Cheng Chui Ping aka "Sister Ping"
• Golden Venture Disaster
• Michael Lin's artwork at Peabody Essex Museum
• I Was Born with Two Tongues
• Tyehimba Jess's Olio
• Syncopated Sonnets
• Kunidman
• Cathy Linh Che
• Wo Chan
• Jai Arun Ravine
• Trish Salah
• conference: Thinking as Presence, creative writing, race and the arts. CFS!

The Sound of Waves Breaking this week is from Jon Jang and the Pan-Asian Arkestra's "Night in Tunisia," just in case you're curious. This episode was edited by Mitchel Davidovitz, whose sound project you can find here on bandcamp