Sally Wen Mao is the author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014), the winner of the 2012 Kinereth Gensler Award and a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Pick of Fall 2014. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2013 and is forthcoming or published in Poetry, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, and Gulf Coast, among others. A Kundiman fellow, she holds a B.A. from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.F.A. from Cornell University, where she was a lecturer in creative writing and composition for three years. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches in the Asian American Studies department at Hunter College.
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2020
Ode to Egress
I’ve always been taken with egrets the way their wings fold alone in the tall grass how their name is an echo of regret egret this shoreline has always carried […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2020
Ode to Emptiness
There comes a time when you stop hoping for love. What then to live for? There are substitutes: the lunch on your lap, the power lines overhead, the heritage buildings […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2020
Playing Dead
The first time I was touched, parts of me were seen: the nautilus, the teeth, the cavern of mouth, how a question marks the spine and then it is never […]
Nonfiction
Sept/Oct 2019
On Sparrows
God keep his oath to sparrows, Who of little love Know how to starve! — Emily Dickinson My father was born on New Year’s Day in 1960. When he was an infant, my […]
Fall 2014
Close Encounters of the Liminal Kind
Maglev train, Beijing to Wuhan—
snacks in the holster, I ride
the test track. We are crash dummies