Sunday Sparrows

Song Lin’s poems explore his sojourns in several countries, the natural world outside him, and his own inner landscape. His early imprisonment during the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests gave rise to the title poem, as well as a profound sense of yearning that pervades much of his work. He is a wanderer in the world and in the language of poetry, often finding beauty in others that are also on the move: birds, rivers, the wind. While his work is rooted in both contemporary and classical Chinese poetry, he incorporates American, French, and Latin-American literary traditions into his poems.

Jami Proctor Xu is a poet, translator, artist, and mother who splits her time between Northern California and China, and writes in both English and Chinese. Her poems appear frequently in journals and anthologies in China and the US, and have been translated into Vietnamese, Bengali, and Spanish. Her full-length collection Suddenly Starting to Dance was published by Yi Press in 2016. She has read at international poetry festivals in China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and the US, and her poems and translations have appeared in journals and anthologies in the US, China, and India. In 2016, she co-organized an international poetry event for the International Writing Center at Beijing Normal University. In 2013 she received a Zhujiang Poetry Award for a non-Chinese poet who has made a contribution to contemporary Chinese poetry.

Song Lin, born in Xiamen, China, has published five collections of poetry (two of which were translated into French and published in France), two books of prose, and has co-edited a contemporary poetry anthology. He began writing poetry in the 1980s as a “campus poet,” and was imprisoned for almost a year for participating in student protests. He married a French woman, moved to Paris in 1991, and subsequently lived in Singapore and Argentina, before returning to China in 2003. He has received Rotterdam and Romanian International Poetry Fellowships and the Shanghai Literature Prize. He is a poetry editor for the literary journal Jintian.