Juvenilia Book Talk with Poet Ken Chen

The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU presents a special reading and conversation with poet, 2009 winner of the annual Yale Younger Poets competition, and Asian American Writers' Workshop Executive Director Ken Chen as he reads from his collection Juvenilia.

These poems of maturation chronicle the poet’s relationship with his immigrant family and his unknowing attempt to recapture the unity of youth through comically doomed love affairs that evaporate before they start. Hungrily eclectic, the wry and emotionally piercing poems in this collection steal the forms of the shooting script, blues song, novel, memoir, essay, logical disputation, aphorism—even classical Chinese poetry in translation. But as contest judge Louise Glück notes in her foreword, “The miracle of this book is the degree to which Ken Chen manages to be both exhilaratingly modern (anti-catharsis, anti-epiphany) while at the same time never losing his attachment to voice, and the implicit claims of voice: these are poems of intense feeling. . . . Like only the best poets, Ken Chen makes with his voice a new category.”

Following the reading, Ken Chen will be in conversation with Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen, Founding Director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

Ken Chen is the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. His work has been published or recognized in Best American Essays 2006, Best American Essays 2007, and The Boston Review of Books. A graduate of Yale Law School, he lives in Brooklyn, NY.