Shelley Wong

Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, 2022), which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and winner of a Lambda Literary Award.

Longer bio:
Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, 2022), which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. She lives in San Francisco.

Wong’s poems have appeared in many publications, including American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The New Republic. Her poems have been anthologized in We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word (Haymarket, 2024), Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry (Green Linden Press, 2024), and They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2022).

Her honors include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships, residencies, and support from Kundiman, MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Montalvo Arts Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, Willapa Bay AiR, Vermont Studio Center, I-Park Foundation, Fire Island National Seashore, and SPACE. She has received an individual artist grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission supporting her second manuscript, a book on California.

She has taught creative writing at the University of San Francisco and the Ohio State University and led workshops for Kenyon College, Arizona State University, and Minnesota State University at Mankato.

Born and raised in Long Beach, California, she is queer and fourth-generation Chinese American. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Ohio State University and a BA in English from UC Berkeley.

Artist profiles
Headlands Center for the Arts | MacDowell | Montalvo Arts Center