Chen Chen visits SUNY Geneseo
Photo courtesy of Photo Editor, Faith Zatlukal
On Apr. 9, 2025, the SUNY Geneseo campus and larger community had the pleasure of being visited by nationally acclaimed poet, editor, and professor Chen Chen. Chen received his MFA from Syracuse University and his PhD from Texas Tech University. He is also the author of two poetry collections titled When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities, which came out in 2017, and Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, which hit shelves in 2022. He has been the recipient of various awards, recognitions, and nominations, such as the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, and his debut collection was longlisted for the National Book Award.
During his visit, Chen held two events. One was a generative poetry workshop, held that day from 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM in Welles 111, also known as the Harding Lounge. This event was an RSVP-only event and had in attendance 15 students, plus the Director of Creative Writing, Professor Sonya Bilocerkowycz. This workshop sought to challenge students in their approach to form and writing, using a difficult and explorative prompt where they could then begin experimentation, or generation, with the potential to turn the work done there into a future poem.
The prompt played with an anagramic structure, based on a poem Chen had written in graduate school after a professor had prompted students to create a poem only containing words that could be found in their name. Chen remarks how, at the time, this prompt felt like some sort of disadvantage to him, as his name only contains four total letters, only one of them being a vowel. From this, he found himself pushed to find a way to make this structure work for him and eventually landed at his poem “Chen [No Middle Name] Chen,” inspired by how his name would appear on class rosters.
Pulling from all the letters in the poem’s title, Chen creates a biting and explorative poem about names and the way we refer to one another. He focuses on the negative person-identifiers levied against him versus a list of ethereal, imagined middle names in the final stanza that lead into a poem that ultimately delights in itself and the power of language and discovery.
To the workshop, he also brought the poem “Irreversible Fetal Anomalies” by Chloe Honum, inspired by Chen’s movement of creating a poem only using letters found in the title to create the words for a poem. Though it takes a different approach, having both of these pieces worked to show not only the format in its original conception but also the ways that other writers have chosen to interact with it in divergent ways.
After this, from 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM, Chen hosted a reading in Doty 300, also known as the Tower Room. Here, Chen was introduced and welcomed by the community as a whole and the event’s host, the English Department. Chen was then welcomed by a senior English (creative writing) and Adolescence Education major with a minor in Philosophy, Kendall Cruise, as his student introducer. Cruise’s introduction details the more formal accreditation of Chen’s writing and personal reflections of his impact on her as a writer and reader, tracing common thematic threads in his work.
For attendees, Chen read poems “I’m not a religious person but,” “First Light,” “Kafka’s Axe & Michael’s Vest,” “Every Poem Is My Most Asian Poem,” “Spring,” and two of his newer works “2pm in provincetown—” and “Crab Fried Rice.”
Through this coalition of works, Chen shared inspirations behind various of his works, such as the inevitably of a “snow poem,” exemplified by “Kafka’s Axe & Michael’s Vest,” after his late professor Michael Burkard, fulfilling the tradition that “…everyone was like ‘you’re just gonna write so much about the snow’… but I was determined. I was like ‘I’m not writing a snow poem— I’m not gonna do it.’ and by the end of the semester I had five.” In even his anecdotes, Chen’s undeniable humor could be felt by all those who were there, which worked effortlessly with his poetry’s reflective and naturalistic qualities.
After his reading, copies of his book were available to be purchased with cash through a Campus Bookstore official. Chen was gracious enough to stay for a book signing, where many eager students and professors lined up to talk with him one-on-one and obtain a signed copy of his collections.