Lisa Chen


Lisa Chen is a Brooklyn-based writer who was born in Taipei, Taiwan. Chen earned her B.A. from UC Berkeley and her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa.

Career

Chen's debut poetry collection, Mouth, was published through Kaya Press in 2007. In an interview with Writer's Bone, Chen said she garnered inspiration for her collection from her email spam folder, ads, news items, conversation, and Hokusai’s 100 Views of Mount Fuji, among other influences. In 2009, Mouth won the Book Award for Poetry from the Association of Asian American Studies.
She has held residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program and Blue Mountain Center, and was a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship Finalist in Nonfiction Literature in 2017 and a Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow from 2015-2016. She received a 2018 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.
In an interview with the Sonora Review, Chen said she is interested in written forms "animated by what Viktor Shklovsky called ostranenie, or 'making strange'—sometimes translated as 'estrangement' or 'defamiliarization.'"