Marilyn Chin: 2021 Writer in Residence

The Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University is thrilled to announce that poet Marilyn Chin will serve as the spring 2021 Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in- Residence.

Author of poetry collections such as A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems (2018), Hard Love Province: Poems (2014), Rhapsody in Plain Yellow: Poems, (2003), The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (1994), Dwarf Bamboo (1987), Chin has received numerous accolades. These include the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the United States Artist Foundation Award, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Stegner Fellowship and the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, among others. Most recently, Chin was the winner of the 2020 Ruth Lilly Prize, which honors a living poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition.

A taste of Chin’s work

Gruel

By MARILYN CHIN

Your name is Diana Toy.

And all you may have for breakfast is rice gruel.

You can’t spit it back into the cauldron for it would be unfilial.

You can’t ask for yam gruel for there is none.

You can’t hide it in the corner for it would surely be found,

and then you would be served cold, stale rice gruel.

This is the philosophy of your tong:

you, the child, must learn to understand the universe

through the port-of-entry, your mouth,

to discern bitter from sweet, pungent from bland.

You were told that the infant Buddha once devoured earth

and spewed forth the wisdom of the ages.

Meat or gruel, wine or ghee,

even if it’s gruel, even if it’s nothing,

that gruel, that nothingness will shine

into the oil of your mother’s scrap-iron wok,

into the glare of your father’s cleaver,

and dance in your porcelain bowl.

Remember, what they deny you won’t hurt you.

What they spare you, you must make shine,

so shine, shine . . .

Hollins MFA

in Creative Writing