Yanyi is an American poet and critic. He won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize in 2018 for his first book, '' The Year of Blue Water''.

Life

Yanyi graduated from

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

in 2013. He is an associate editor at Foundry and an MFA candidate at

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...

. He was an

Asian American Writers' Workshop The Asian American Writers' Workshop (often abbreviated AAWW) is a New York–based nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 1991 to support Asian American writers, literature and community. Cofounders Curtis Chin, Christina Chiu, Marie M ...

Margins Fellow in 2017-2018. He was a 2015

Poets House Poets House is a national literary center and poetry library based in New York City, United States. It contains more than 80,000 volumes of poetry, and is free and open to the public. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, in November 2020, operations ...

Emerging Poets Fellow. He was a 201
James Merrill House
Fellow.

''The Year of Blue Water''

In 2018, Yanyi's manuscript was selected as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

Carl Phillips Carl Phillips (born 23 July 1959) is an American writer and poet. He is a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2023, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his '' Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.'' ...

, the judge for the competition, said of his manuscript: “As its title implies, ‘The Year of Blue Water’ reads as a record of time, a kind of daybook of observations in sentences so crystalline, spare, direct, and yet offhand, that it can be easy to miss, at first, the book’s complexity...The poems... nviteus into the life they invoke, a life that both argues for and is an example of how identity is multifaceted: the poems’ speaker is an artist, of an apparent immigrant background, is trans, is deeply invested in friendship as a rescuing form of community. Identity, then, as not any one of these things but all of them, each marker of identity at once incidental and essential.” Identity features prominently in Yanyi's work, who said of this collection, "What I was writing had to be free from the idea of it being a product—free of the idea that it would educate people about what it's like to be a queer and trans Chinese-American person in the world."

Later works

In 2022, ''Dream of the Divided Field'' was published. Yanyi said, "The book asks the larger question of how one retains or has a self between two moments in time. It asks if it is possible for that same person to exist."

Works

* '' The Year of Blue Water'',

Yale University Press Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day and Clarence Day, grandsons of Benjamin Day, and became a department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and ope ...

2019. , * ''Dream of the Divided Field'
Penguin Random House
(One World) 2022.

References

{{authority control Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American male poets 21st-century American poets 21st-century American male writers American writers of Asian descent American LGBTQ writers Columbia College (New York) alumni New York University alumni