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For a long time, I wrote poetry located directly within/among my lived-in experience. Discovering (and being forced through an assignment into!) the persona poem was terrifying and exhilarating, what I imagined as the first flight. It liberated me into the far limbs of my imagination and enabled me to enter different approximations of truths from the world around me (and my life), which I had often felt closed off to me previously. The persona poem let me enter into a creative process which allowed me to write my first book-length sequence of poems centered around the adventures of a girl called Xiaomei. These Xiaomei poems are from The Heart's Traffic, which will come out from Red Hen Press in 2009.
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Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009), which feature the adventures of a girl called Xiaomei. Past occupations include karaoke singer, flautist, 1st grade literacy teacher, community organizer, construction job counselor, and a severely lost person in the Rocky Mountains. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Water~Stone Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, OCHO and Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves. A Kundiman Fellow, Ching-In is currently an MFA candidate at UC Riverside.