Valerie Hsiung
Writer & poet
BIOGRAPHY
Valerie Hsiung is a poet who writes between worlds, where language meets ritual and abolition meets afterlife. Drawing on diasporic, ecological, and metaphysical inquiry, her books dissolve the borders of poetry, prose, performance, and philosophy into a single listening body. She is the author of eight full-length books, including The pedestrian (Nightboat Books), The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse), The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath), and To love an artist (Essay Press). Born to Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the foothills of Colorado where she teaches at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
PROJECT : The Pre-Child
The Pre-Child is a trilogy of books across which a shared grief-dwelling poetics, shaped by the absence of collective mourning infrastructures, charts how grief is displaced into customs of direct and ambient violence. Language here asks how one lives, makes, and remains activated inside an interminable grief—continually remaking upon ruins, accepting instability as fundamental rather than aberrant. Childhood becomes a primary portal: the obliterated voice is the child’s voice, and the child’s voice is also the truest portal to death.