Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. She received a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Chinese Literature and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. Presently, Chin is Professor Emerita at San Diego State University and serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Her most recent book is A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2018). Chin’s other books of poems include Hard Love Province, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, Dwarf Bamboo, and the Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty. Her book of wild girl fiction is called Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen.

She has won numerous awards, including the distinguished Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement in poetry from the Poetry Foundation, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the United States Artist Foundation Award, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, two NEAs, the United Artist Foundation Award, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, five Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan, a Lannan Residency and others. In 2017, she was honored by the Asian Pacific Islander Caucus and the California Assembly for her activism and excellence in education.

Visit her website.

Read poems by Marilyn Chin

Poetry Foundation

Academy of American Poets

Ronald Schuchard, the Goodrich C. White Professor of English and Irish Studies, Emeritus, Emory University, is the author of numerous studies of modern authors, particularly T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats. His Eliot’s Dark Angel won the Robert Penn Warren / Cleanth Brooks Prize for outstanding literary criticism, and his The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts won the Robert Rhodes Prize for an outstanding book on Irish literature. He is co-editor with John Kelly of three volumes of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats and general editor of the eight-volume online and print editions of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is presently a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. To view the finding aid for Ron's papers, click here.

Anthony Cuda is a scholar and university professor who teaches classes on twentieth-century poetry, British and American literature of the modernist period (1900-1945), Dante, and American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of The Passions of Modernism: Eliot, Yeats, Woolf and Mann (University of South Carolina Press, 2010). With Ronald Schuchard, he co-edited of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, The Critical Edition. Vol. II: The Perfect Critic: 1919-1926 (London and Baltimore: Faber & Faber and Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), which was awarded the Modernist Studies Association 2015 Book Prize for an edition, anthology, or collection. Cuda’s reviews of contemporary poetry have appeared in The Washington Post Book World, The New Criterion, FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, The International Poetry Review, and the American Book Review. Learn more here.

Other collections discussed in the episode:

Finding aid for Seamus Heaney's papers.
Finding aid for the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature.

Diane Gordon Briggs is the youngest child of Barbara Gordon and astronaut Richard F. Gordon of Gemini XI and Apollo 12. She is a wife, mother of six (like her mom), and a Christian Counselor. Join in with Diane and her closest childhood friend, Tracy L. Scott, as they reminisce over their childhood and their dads’ space adventures during the early days of NASA.

Tracy L. Scott is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Emory University. She grew up in Nassau Bay, Texas, as part of the early NASA community (her father, David R. Scott, flew on the Apollo 15 lunar mission). She recently donated her parents' papers from the early NASA era to the Stuart A. Rose Library (see the Finding Aid for those papers here). Dr. Scott will be teaching a course in Spring 2022: “Moon Bound: A Sociology of the Apollo Era.”