
Somehow, with her, it always ended in this
painful feeling.
I was used to it.

JinJin Xu is a poet, artist, and filmmaker based in Shanghai.
Her inter-disciplinary work engages in various forms of docu-poetics: unheard soundscapes, unspoken memories, the taboos in our most intimate relationships. Her work moves between poetry, experimental film, sound Installations, and performance— seeking to hear what lies beneath ordinary reality, creating a new poetry of witness through echoes and stutters and dialect. What would you say if you could?
She is the 2020 winner of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award and her poems have received honors from 92Y Discovery Prize, Southern Humanities Review, Tupelo Press, Poetry Society of America's Cecil Hemley Prize, Global Research Institute (Athens), and two Pushcart nominations. Her films have exhibited at Berlin’s Harun Farocki Institute, NYC’s The Immigrant Artist Biennial, NYU's Production Lab, LA Design Festival, and she was a curatorial fellow at the Flaherty Seminars.
She received her BA from Amherst College and traveled for a year as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow recording docu-poems with women dislocated cross nine countries. She was then a Lillian Vernon Fellow at NYU, where she received her MFA in Poetry, and taught creative writing workshops through NYU Tisch's Art of Future Imaginations Grant.
Her debut chapbook There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife was selected by Aria Aber for the inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize (Radix Media, 2020). Her second chapbook This Is My Testimony interrogates language, otherness, and belonging in writing workshops (Black Warrior Review, 2022).
She is currently Guest Features Director of LIFE Magazine and founder of JinJin Creative Studio.

“Reader, you are lucky to have the award-winning chapbook of JinJin Xu before you. These superb poems resonate with personal and cultural intimacy. JinJin Xu writes with the insight and skill of a veteran poet, a doyen, a griot. Her lines open and breathe on the page as they do in the mind and heart. There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife is inventive, linguistic, ambitious, tender, wise, brave. This fabulous chapbook may be a collector’s item someday.”
— Terrance Hayes
JULY, 2023
SOUND INSTALLATION & PERFORMANCE
SYSTEM, SHANGHAI
This Is My Testimony , Black warrior Review chapbook, 2022
92 Y Discovery Prize , runner up, 2021
the mysteries and motifs of pandemic dreams (voiceover) , The New Yorker, 2021
Pandemic Diaries , The Common , 2021
Legeia interview with Ashley Wagner , 2021
" Out of body recognition: A conversation with JinJin Xu" with The Rumpus , 2021
Pushcart Nomination, Black Warrior Review, 2020
