Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which was long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award and won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and A Public Space, and her essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, and New Literary History. An associate professor of English at George Washington University, she co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman and was the visiting poet at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program in Spring 2019. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her family. 

“[Chang’s] voice has reached a new maturity and internal-intimacy, daring a tireless and vulnerable look at the winter of scattered selves.”
—Frontier Poetry

“[In Some Say the Lark], each dynamic formal shift, each nimble swing in register, reveals a different kind of quiet; a fresh consideration of familiar attempts to ‘redress sorrow’ in a way that is more real and true.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Nothing is settled in these poems full of questions only falling snow can ask.”
—Minnesota Public Radio

“[Some Say the Lark is] devastatingly precise in the emotions it dredges up. Chang is a poet who merges the abstract and the concrete with fierce, visceral energy.”
—Shelf Awareness

“The ambitious and heartfelt second volume from Jennifer Chang gives many kinds of readers many ways in.”
—Stephanie Burt, American Poets

“. . .[Some Say the Lark] exists in a state of constant movement. Offering bright red birds among cold and bare winter scenery, this collection resonates with longing.”
—The Arkansas International

“Jennifer Chang’s Some Say the Lark is a piercing meditation, rooted in loss and longing, and manifest in dazzling leaps of the imagination—the familiar world rendered strange. In these poems a dark wisdom is at work reminding us that being in a state of longing is the nature of existential loneliness and that among our desires is a kind of self-destruction: ‘we love loss as we love ourselves,/ secretly. And too much.’ The gift of these poems is in the act of defiance which engendered their creation: while the soul might begin in isolation, through language we can find our necessary adhesion to something larger, communal, full of radiant hope.”
—Natasha Trethewey

”Jennifer Chang composes one astonishing phrase after another, edge to unexpected edge, a world that is both intimate and hallucinatory, where seemingly disparate images reveal their shared perimeter, their mutual wildness—and suddenly we’re immersed in such exuberant sorrow. In Some Say the Lark, anything can erupt into fury, anything into tenderness. This book: what an agony, what a reconciliation.”
—Patrick Rosal