Kathy Jiang
Kathy Jiang is a poet and therapist from the D.C. area. Her work, which has been nominated for Best New Poets and received support from Brooklyn Poets and other organizations, is featured or forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Hayden's Ferry Review, Sundog Lit, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an editor and facilitator at Seventh Wave and a poetry reader at Adroit, and she will be featured in the 2026 Poets in Pajamas series.
I write about mothers, lovers, and others. My work is concerned with themes of origin, intergenerational haunting, the coexistence of violence and softness in bodies, and a queer, diasporic feminine consciousness. My poems span forms like the abecedarian, duplex, visual poetry, and the tried-and-true (and very much riffed-upon) couplet and prose poem.
In many ways, I am always trying to answer Bhanu Kapil's twelve questions, posed in The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, particularly “Who are you and whom do you love?” and “Where did you come from / how did you arrive?”
Gratefully, I write in conversation with other creatives like Kapil, from contemporary giants like Louise Glück and James Wright, to Taiwanese filmmakers Hsu Chih-yen and Mag Hsu, to fellow Asian-American woman poets like Victoria Chang, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Cathy Song. My favorite poem of all time is Anne Carson's “The Glass Essay.”
