Jenny Xie

Jenny Xie was born in Hefei, China, and raised in New Jersey. She holds degrees from Princeton University and New York University’s creative writing program.

Xie’s second poetry collection, The Rupture Tense: Poems, was published by Graywolf Press in 2022. Her debut poetry collection, Eye Level, was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera as the winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award, given by the Academy of American Poets, and was published by Graywolf Press in 2018. Eye Level is also a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry in 2018.

Xie has received fellowships and support from Kundiman, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Poets & Writers. In 2020, she received a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature. She is also the recipient of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize for Nowhere to Arrive.

About Eye Level Herrera writes:

‘Between Hanoi and Sapa’ this collection begins and continues with its ‘frugal mouth’ that ‘spends the only foreign words it owns.’ This knowing ‘travels’ in a spiral-shaped wisdom. We go places; we enter multiple terrains of seeing; we cross cultural borders of time, voices, locations—of consciousness. Then—we notice we are in a trembling stillness with all beings and all things. Jenny Xie’s Eye Level is a timely collection of beauty, clarity, and expansive humanity.

Xie has taught at New York University and Princeton University and now teaches at Bard College. She lives in New York City.