A Poet’s Geography

“Huang grew up in Shanghai and came to the U.S. for college at 17. She arrived at NYU as an economics student, then added English as a second major and a minor in creative writing, completing her undergraduate degree in 2020.

After graduation, she worked in finance at S&P Global, which made sense on paper and, she says, to her parents. Over time, she grew restless. “I was really sick of the corporate language,” she says. “Everything was so polished and empty.” Poetry became her escape hatch. “I was like, OK, let me just dream.”

That urge pulled her back to the literature of her childhood and toward an image-driven way of thinking. While working for the corporation, she began writing in Chinese again after a long lapse, and she was interested in its ambiguities. “There is no tense,” she says. “In classical Chinese poetry, there aren’t pronouns or anything. It’s really just image.”

Huang earned an M.F.A. at NYU. All the poems in the Kenyon Review contest packet were written during her M.F.A. stint. In many of them, she places a single Chinese character at the top of a stanza, then lets the English unfold beneath it. She uses the characters intentionally, she says, “to destabilize the meaning a little bit,” creating “a slight sense of dissociation at the point where the meanings fail.”