About the Author
Xiao Yue Shan
Born in China and living on Vancouver Island. then telling be the antidote won the Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize and was published in 2024. How Often I Have Chosen Love won the Frontier Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published in 2019. She has received the New Millennium Award for Poetry and the Juxtaprose Poetry Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, the Artlyst Art to Poetry Award, and the Ambit Poetry Competition. Poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Poetry Northwest, and more. Prose works have appeared in Granta, Cleveland Review of Books, Socrates on the Beach, 3:AM Magazine, Electric Literature, The Shanghai Literary Review, and more. Poem-films have shown in London, Vienna, New York City, and Athens. Her work has been supported by the Canadian Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and Arts Council Tokyo.
She translates from the Chinese and acts as editor-in-chief of the Chinese-English bilingual literary journal, Spittoon Literary Magazine. She also edits the Asymptote Journal blog and Cicada.
Xiao Yue is her first name. Shan is her last name. This is how you say it:
How Often I Have Chosen Love
Color and light and life invigorate Xiao Yue Shan’s debut chapbook—or, in her own words: “a thrill of poppy and chrysanthemum”. How Often I Have Chosen Love explores the rediscovery of her nuanced and complex family, her nuanced and complex sense of home, the nuanced and complex history of China. From the flag in Tiananmen Square to the apartments of San Francisco, Shan complicates our sense of home and history by filling every reflection and every moment with the bursting blue light of Hong Kong, the delicate sprawl of blooming vegetation—envisioning a creation myth that seeks to have “no tale of falling.” In the voice of a modern woman of two nations, Shan’s work finds her deepest authenticity. Her rich palette of color, of flower and nation and jewel, is an achievement only Shan’s unique perspective could conceive. Xiao Yue Shan is an emerging poet whose words and heart beat with the exact rhythm of our times.