ABOUT | JinJin Xu

“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

Xu’s inter-disciplinary work is birthed from poetry, realizing itself in various forms of docu-poetics: unheard soundscapes, unspoken memories, the taboos in our most intimate relationships, the tensions between mothers/daughters. Her work moves between poetry, experimental film, sound Installations, and performance— seeking to hear what lies beneath ordinary reality, creating a new poetics of witness through echoes and stutters and dialect.

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 installations, films, and performances have/will be exhibited at How Museum, Shanghai, the 13th Shanghai Biennial, Berlin’s Harun Farocki Institute, NYC’s The Immigrant Artist Biennial, NYU's Production Lab, LA Design Festival, Shanghai's Powerlong Museum 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 received her MFA in Poetry from NYU, where was a Lillian Vernon fellow, and taught hybrid ballet-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 was named 100 Most Influential Chinese in 2023 by Forbes China. She is currently pursuing her MFA in moving image at Bard College.

PRAISE FOR THERE IS STILL SINGING IN THE AFTERLIFE

“There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife is a demanding, deeply felt and formally inventive constellation of poems. Resisting the expectations of what poetry should look like, the text rearranges what we know of family, country, and language.”
—Aria Aber, Hard Damage

“The way family pervades every aspect of our lives, the way we remain children forever, the way we can never transcend our bodies, the way some people really do write their poems in their own blood, the way we can move to a new country and become masters of its language and poetry and still never be set free from the grasp of our homes, the way the dead refuse to leave us, the way there is still singing in the afterlife, these are only some of the ways JinJin Xu writes sharp, beautiful and genre-threatening poems in this ridiculous time and place. Listen to her quiet, insistent voice; you’ll learn something.”
— Matthew Rohrer, A Green Light

"JinJin Xu is writing poems that aren’t like other poems, poems that enact a sacred-feeling disorientation and then arrive at specific ends, poems that wind their way intoxicatingly to weighty and sobering truths. Hello, surprise. Hello, newness. ‘When I say words out loud they become real,’ Xu writes. And to that statement I raise my hands in praise. Xu is part of the very bright future of poetry. Thankfully for us, the future is happening now.”
— Carrie Fountain, Instant Winner: Poems

“At the center of There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife is JinJin Xu’s lyric voice: it has a depth and deftness that is exhilarating. It is truly marvelous how Xu weaves the intimacy of a contemporary speaker and her family into a poem-tapestry of history, literature, and ghosts. From Mao’s red book to the red dust that lies in the wake of a lost generation, the scope and emotional register of this chapbook is devastating.”
— Sally Wen Mao, Oculus

“JinJin Xu’s There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife is a generational elegy of both wide and close frames. Xu’s poems ask where grief swims beneath social and historical forces of silence; they float across languages and their modes of meaning against death, against the silence we all most wish to reach through.”
— Yanyi, The Year of Blue Water