Description
Poetry. Asian American Studies. "In this brilliant collection of paragrammatic and punning lyric, Huang shows himself to be a unique master of the language game. His sensitivity to word, syllable, and letter is that of a poet for whom English, first acquired secretly as a second language by a teenager in Beijing, has become a site of wonder and amazement."—Marjorie Perloff
"Quicksilver mentations, instant revisions, and Cecil Taylor riffs are warbled around the page in contrapuntal ecstasies by which documentary histories of immigration, imitation, and translation are tuned. Huang's is a canny ad lib, the very thing you want to sing to the babe you bring to your crib."—Forrest Gander
Author Bio
Yunte Huang grew up in a small town in southeastern China, where at age eleven he began to learn English by secretly listening to Voice of America programs on a bettered transistor radio. After receiving his B.A. in English from Peking University, Yunte came to the United States in 1991, landing in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. As a struggling Chinese restaurateur in the Deep South, he continued to study American literature, reading William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, and Emily Dickinson on the greasy kitchen floor.
In 1994, Yunte attended the Poetics Program in Buffalo, where, at an estate sale, he discovered the Charlie Chan novels. He was immediately hooked. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1999, he taught as an assistant professor of English at Harvard, where he began researching the story of the Chinese detective—both real and fictional—and the life of Earl Derr Biggers, a Harvard graduate who had authored the Chan novels.
Yunte Huang is currently a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Author City: SANTA BARBARA, CA USA