Two Poems

Abstract

Jami Proctor-Xu is a poet, translator, scholar, and mother. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and spent ten years in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to Beijing in 2008. She currently divides her time between Beijing and California. She changed her major from Philosophy to Chinese her sophomore year of college because her experiences working at a Chinese restaurant in Tucson led her to decide she wanted to study Chinese and travel to China. She wrote her first poem in Chinese the following summer, and began writing poems in Chinese more regularly beginning in 2008. Currently, she writes in English and Chinese, and translates back and forth between the two languages. Her poems and translations have appeared in journals such as Chinese Literature Today, Squaw Valley Review, Left Curve, and She regularly reads at poetry festivals and events in different parts of China and is an alumnus of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference and the Squaw Valley Poetry Workshop. She is currently translating a collection of poems by the Chinese poet Song Lin and working on her own poetry collections in English and Chinese.