Isabella Wang
[Author Name]
Biography
Isabella Wang is the author of the chapbook, On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press 2019), and her full-length debut, Pebble Swing (Nightwood Editions, 2021). Among other recognitions, she was most recently shortlisted for Arc's Poem of the Year award and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly's Edna Staebler Essay Contest. Her poetry and prose have appeared in over thirty literary journals and three anthologies. She is an editor at Room magazine. Her current projects include a second poetry manuscript, Choreography of Forgetting, and her poetic, sociological memoir, Memory Home Lane, is forthcoming with Dundurn Press in 2023.
Poetics Statement
“My paternal grandmother was a writer, poet, and elementary school teacher in my family’s ancestral hometown, Anju, Jining. She taught her students how to read words by the jujube trees she helped to plant at the entrance of their elementary school yard. She was the first woman in the village to become an academic, and the only person in my family to process the ability to read both the traditional and simplified script. She was not able to pass this knowledge to her son, or to me, her granddaughter. The Chinese Cultural Revolution took her life, and the people in my family have been afraid to express themselves as writers ever since.
As a first-generation immigrant, my first poetry collection, Pebble Swing, reifies the image of stones skipping their way across a body of water, or, in my case, syllables and traces of my mother tongue bouncing back from the water’s reflective surface. This collection traces an immigrant experience through the loss of language, caesuras, and poetic fragmentation. With my second manuscript in-progress, Choreography of Forgetting, I am attempting to reclaim my relationship to my first, inherited language through tracing the stories and poetries housed in the choreography of the strokes of traditional and modern Chinese characters—the only responsible way of re-engaging with this language that I know how. ”
