Jennifer Tseng

Jennifer Tseng is an award-winning American poet and fiction writer. Her work often explores themes of identity, memory, and family and has been widely recognized for its lyrical prose and emotional depth.

Jennifer Tseng was born in Indiana and raised in California by a first-generation Chinese immigrant engineer and a third-generation German American microbiologist.

Tseng earned an MA in Asian American Studies at UCLA, an MFA in creative writing at the University of Houston, and she was twice a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Her first book, The Man With My Face, won the 2005 Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s National Poetry Manuscript Competition and a 2006 PEN American Center Open Book Award.

She is also the author of two more award-winning books of poetry, the bilingual Red Flower, White Flower (2013), featuring Chinese translations by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen, and Not so dear Jenny (2017), poems made with her father’s English letters.

Her debut novel, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness ( 2015), was shortlisted for the PEN American Center's Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the New England Book Award. Mayumi is available in English, Italian, and Danish.

Her flash fiction collection, The Passion of Woo & Isolde (2017), won an Eric Hoffer Book Award and was the Firecracker Award finalist.

Tseng has taught creative writing and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Hampshire College, the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, New Hampshire Institute of Art, Massachusetts College of Art, and Oregon State University Cascades' Low Residency MFA program.

Jennifer Tseng is currently an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz.

Photo credit: IG @tsengisland