Wendy Chen is the author of the novel THEIR DIVINE FIRES and the poetry collection UNEARTHINGS. Her translations of Song-dynasty woman writer Li Qingzhao are forthcoming in 2025 in a collection titled THE MAGPIE AT NIGHT.

Chen is the recipient of prizes and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, MacDowell and elsewhere. Her writing has appeared widely in prestigious venues such as Freeman's, A Public Space and Mid-American Review. Her work has been translated into multiple languages and adapted into musical compositions. She has taught and spoken at colleges, universities and arts organizations such as the Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, Poetry Foundation and Yale University.

She is the editor of Figure 1 and associate editor-in-chief of Tupelo Quarterly. Previously, she was the poetry and translation editor of Denver Quarterly. She earned her MFA in poetry from Syracuse University and her PhD in English from the University of Denver. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Books by Wendy Chen

Their Divine Fires

by Wendy Chen - Fiction, Women's Fiction

In 1917, at the dawn of the Chinese revolution, Yunhong is growing up in the southern China countryside and falls deeply in love with the son of a wealthy landlord. On the night of her wedding, her brother destroys the marriage, irrevocably changing the shape of Yunhong’s family to come: her daughter, Yuexin, will never know her father. Haunted by a history that she does not understand, Yuexin passes on those memories to her daughters Hongxing and Yonghong, who come of age in the years following Mao’s death, battling the push and pull of political forces as they forge their own paths. Each generation guards its secrets, leaving Emily, great-granddaughter of Yunhong and living in contemporary America, to piece together what actually happened between her mother and her aunt, and the weight of their shared ancestry.