Faculty

Profile

Wendy Xu is the author of three collections of poetry, including The Past (Wesleyan, 2021), and Phrasis (2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review. Xu was awarded the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry in 2011, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2014, and her poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Granta, Poetry, Tin House, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, and widely elsewhere. 

She holds an MFA from the Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and has been on creative writing faculty at The Iowa Writers' Workshop, NYU, and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Columbia University before joining the full-time faculty at The New School. 

A critical text on poetics entitled Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire was published by the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry Series in 2025.

Degrees Held

B.A., English, University of Iowa

M.F.A., Poetry, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Recent Publications

Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire (University of Michigan Press, 2025)

The Past (Wesleyan, 2021)

Phrasis (Fence Books, 2017)

You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013)

Research Interests

contemporary poetry, poetic forms, immigration narratives, documentary poetics, Asian-American literature, ekphrastic poetry, creative nonfiction and the lyric essay, 

Awards And Honors

The Past, Best Books of 2021, The Boston Globe 
Phrasis, 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017, New York Times Book Review 
Phrasis, Fence Books Ottoline Prize (2017)
Harman Writer-in-Residence, Baruch College CUNY (2017)
Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in Poetry (2014)
You Are Not Dead, 10 Best Poetry Debuts, Poets & Writers Magazine (2013)
Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry (2011)