Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang (born 1970) is an American poet, writer, editor, and professor. Her books include the poetry collections Circle (2005), Salvinia Molesta (2008), The Boss (2013), Barbie Chang (2017), Obit (2020), The Trees Witness Everything (2022), and With My Back to the World (2024). She is also the author of the nonfiction book Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (2021) as well as children's books.

The poetry of Victoria Chang do not behave. Just when you think you have pinned her down as a writer of elegant, quiet lyrics, she abandons the traditional line entirely to write blocky, tombstone-like prose poems shaped like newspaper obituaries. Then, she turns around and writes a book of children's verse. Later, she is writing into the quiet, pale grid lines of an Agnes Martin painting. It is a restless, almost defensive way of moving through the literary world, as if she is constantly trying to outrun her own style before it hardens into a monument. Perhaps this restlessness comes from the fact that her path to poetry was entirely unorthodox.

She spent her twenties in a business suit. Born in Detroit to Taiwanese immigrant parents, she grew up in West Bloomfield, Michigan, in a household where art was viewed not as a calling, but as a dangerous vulnerability. Security was the only currency that mattered. Consequently, she did exactly what she was supposed to do: a BA at Michigan, a Master’s at Harvard, and an MBA from Stanford. She managed marketing budgets. She sat in corporate boardrooms. She ran numbers. To the outside observer, she was a business executive on the rise. But there was this quiet, exhausting split-screen existence happening; she was secretly writing on the side, a tension that eventually pulled her to Warren Wilson College for an MFA.

When she finally committed to poetry, she didn’t discard that corporate training. She imported it. You can see the corporate anxiety rattling inside her 2013 collection, The Boss. Written in the frantic, unpunctuated wake of her father’s stroke and her own experiences with corporate hierarchy, the book reads like a panic attack on a spreadsheet. The poems rush down the page without commas or periods, mimicking the breathless pace of a quarterly earnings report. The “boss” in these poems is a slippery, terrifying figure—sometimes an actual employer, sometimes the specter of death, sometimes a father whose body is failing him. She did something similar in Barbie Chang, using complete missing marks couplets to skewer the plastic, white-suburban cliques of school drop-offs and country clubs. It is uncomfortable, funny, and deeply anxious writing. But the real rupture came with OBIT.

Her mother had died of cancer, and her father was dissolving into dementia. Faced with that level of personal wreckage, the traditional, tidy lyric poem felt to her like a complete lie. She couldn’t write neat little stanzas about grief. Instead, she chose the cold, narrow columns of the newspaper obituary. She didn't just eulogize her mother; she wrote obituaries for her mother’s teeth, for her father’s frontal lobe, for “grief,” for “the future.” The language inside these gray rectangles is flat, dry, and devastating. “My mother’s teeth were small and regular,” she writes, cataloging her mother's body as if she were taking inventory of a desk drawer. The book was a critical sensation, winning the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. But the word “success” feels incredibly cheap here. She wasn't chasing awards; she was simply looking for a container that could hold her grief without bursting. Grief, though, doesn't leave just because a book is finished.

She followed OBIT with Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, a hybrid project that feels like an overturned box of archives. Because her parents rarely spoke of their lives in China and Taiwan, Chang was left with a suitcase of old, unreadable documents and a history full of holes. The book is her trying to talk to those silent spaces. Around this same time, she was writing children's books like Is Mommy? and Love, Love, projects that are driven by the exact same question: how do kids learn to live alongside the unspoken pain of their parents? By the time she reached her recent collections, With My Back to the World and her latest, Tree of Knowledge, her work had taken a deeply visual, ekphrastic turn.

In With My Back to the World, she found a hiding place in the pale, silent grid paintings of Agnes Martin. For a poet dealing with depression and the endless, exhausting chatter of the digital age, Martin’s empty canvases offered a literal sanctuary. In Tree of Knowledge, she extends this visual dialogue to Hilma af Klint and Joan Mitchell, utilizing their abstract languages to explore memory and erasure.

The emotional center of Tree of Knowledge, however, is a long poem titled “Eureka,” which confronts the 1885 expulsion of Chinese immigrants from Eureka, California. Three hundred Chinese residents were rounded up by a white committee and forced onto steamboats bound for San Francisco. Rather than writing about this from a safe historical distance, Chang collapses the timeline entirely, putting her own modern, vulnerable body into that freezing Pacific water. It is a stunning, difficult piece of writing. It argues that historical trauma doesn't stay in the past; it settles into the soil, feeding the roots of the trees we walk past every day on our way to work.

Now, Chang is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech, directing their Poetry@Tech program. She has edited for The New York Times Magazine, won a Guggenheim, and received a stack of prestigious accolades. But the awards are almost beside the point. What makes Chang one of the most compelling voices in contemporary poetry is her absolute refusal to remain comfortable. She is an artist who constantly breaks her own tools. The second she masters a form, she abandons it and starts over, trying to find a new way to capture the chaotic, splintered experience of being alive. She remains on the porch, watching the trees fall, writing down the sound of the saw.