These first-hand accounts, akin to an oral history archive, offer a more direct, public, and nuanced understanding of ‘haunting’ as a poetics.
Jane Wong, a doctoral candidate in English, has a new book, a poetry prize, and a teaching position that testify to her overlapping roles as poet and scholar. Jane joined Pacific Lutheran University as a Visiting Assistant Professor in September, teaching creative writing, Asian American studies, and first-year writing.
Her first full-length book, Overpour, was recently published by Action Press. She has also received the 2016 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review for her poem "I Put On My Fur Coat,” which appears in the September/October issue and online. Jane’s poem “Thaw” was also included in Best American Poetry 2015.
Jane was a 2016 Digital Humanities Summer Fellow at the Simpson Center. Her ongoing project, Digital Interviews: The Poetics of Haunting in Asian American Poetry, gathers interviews with leading contemporary poets, along with text, video, and photography, to consider how social, historical, and political contexts “haunt” the work of contemporary Asian American poets in terms of content and form.
“These first-hand accounts, akin to an oral history archive, offer a more direct, public, and nuanced understanding of ‘haunting’ as a poetics,” she writes.