Yanyi is an American poet and critic.
He won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize in 2018 for his first book, ''The Year of Blue Water''.
Life
Yanyi graduated from
Columbia University in 2013. He is an associate editor at Foundry and an MFA candidate at
New York University.
He was an
Asian American Writers' Workshop Margins Fellow in 2017-2018. He was a 2015
Poets House
Poets House is a national literary center and poetry library based in New York City. It contains more than 70,000 volumes of poetry, and is free and open to the public. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, they temporarily suspended operations in Nov ...
Emerging Poets Fellow.
''The Year of Blue Water''
In 2018, Yanyi's manuscript was selected as the winner of the
Yale Series of Younger Poets
The Yale Series of Younger Poets is an annual event of Yale University Press aiming to publish the debut collection of a promising American poet. Established in 1918, the Younger Poets Prize is the longest-running annual literary award in the Uni ...
Prize.
Carl Phillips, the judge for the competition, said of his manuscript: “As its title implies, ‘The Year of Blue Water’ reads as a record of time, a kind of daybook of observations in sentences so crystalline, spare, direct, and yet offhand, that it can be easy to miss, at first, the book’s complexity...The poems...
nviteus into the life they invoke, a life that both argues for and is an example of how identity is multifaceted: the poems’ speaker is an artist, of an apparent immigrant background, is trans, is deeply invested in friendship as a rescuing form of community. Identity, then, as not any one of these things but all of them, each marker of identity at once incidental and essential.”
Works
* ''The Year of Blue Water''
Yale University Press 2019. ,
References
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Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
American male poets
21st-century American poets
21st-century American male writers
American writers of Asian descent
American LGBT writers
Columbia College (New York) alumni