I was called to write at a very young age and was fortunate enough to find some early success in high school and college. In my senior year, I was approached by a literary agent. It wasn’t a good fit, and I took this as a sign that I wasn’t meant to be a writer after all. I went back to graduate school to study sociology and stayed in academia for almost a decade before the birth of my older daughter prompted me to write again. I wrote my first poetry collection on maternity leave and I haven’t stopped since.
Wendy Chin-Tanner is the author of the novel KING OF THE ARMADILLOS and the poetry collections TURN and ANYONE WILL TELL YOU. She is the editor of EMBODIED: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology and cofounder of A Wave Blue World, an independent publishing company for socially conscious graphic novels. Born and raised in NYC, she was educated at Cambridge University, UK and lives with her family in the Hudson Valley.
What I appreciate about Wendy’s voice is her honesty about caregiving, how these responsibilities prompted her to develop a poetry form. She writes truthfully about women’s lives as they claim a writerly self in a world that has been defined through their response to patriarchy.