I’ve known Travis C. Lau since the beginning of the pandemic, as we follow each other on social media. My interview with him for this episode was the first real conversation I’ve had with him. From the moment I hit record, we hit it off like long-lost siblings discovering new things about each other. In this episode, Travis looks back on his complicated relationship with his parents and his relationship with the queer community during his college days, and how that affected his relationship to his own queer Chinese identity. We chatted about his poetry and how his disability and neurodivergence have impacted his work and a deeper understanding of himself. Travis talked about his friendship with the late Alice Wong, a disabled Asian American disability activist and author, and how he wants to remember her. Also, he treats us to a reading of one of his poems.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, he has been published widely in venues of public scholarship and poetry, including three chapbooks--The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019), Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020), Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022)--and a full-length collection of poems, What’s Left Is Tender (Harbor Editions, 2025). He is also co-editor of Every Place on the Map Is Disabled, an anthology of disability poetry and poetics, published with Northwestern University Press in 2026. He was the winner of the Christopher Hewitt Award for Poetry (2019), recipient of the Greater Columbus Arts Council’s Artists Elevated Award in Literature (2024), and the Ohio Arts Council's Artists with Disabilities Access Program Grant (2025). [travisclau.com]

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