Read more
"A collection of poems by Jennifer Chang"--
About the author
Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang is the author of two previous collections. Her debut, The History of Anonymity (2008), was an inaugural selection for the Virginia Quarterly Review Poetry Series and a finalist for the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. Her second book, Some Say The Lark (Alice James Books), was longlisted for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award and won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, and Poetry. Chang holds a BA from the University of Chicago and earned an MFA and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Since 2003, she has been the co-chair of the advisory board for Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Asian American literature. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.
Summary
An Authentic Life is an exacting and fearless interrogation of the education one receives from the institutions of academia and family.
Sprawling yet urgent, meditative yet lucid, the poems in Jennifer Chang’s anticipated third collection, An Authentic Life, offer a bold examination of a world deeply influenced by war and patriarchy. In dialogues against literature, against philosophy, and against God, Chang interrogates the “fathers” who stand at the center of history. Poems navigate wounds opened by explorations of family and generational trauma, and draw on the author’s experiences as a mother, as the daughter of immigrants, and as a citizen of our deeply divided nation. Here, the patriarchal violence of history becomes intimate, brought down to a domestic scale. A woman sweeping the floor cannot escape thoughts of war, or her dying mother, while another scene shows friends questioning the “despite-ness” of love. In poems where the lyric is reimagined as porous, discursive, and bursting open, Chang fearlessly confronts the forms of knowledge that hold power. Meticulous and masterful, An Authentic Life creates a world where we can begin “to unlearn everything.”
Foreword
- full publicity campaign with galleys (print and electronic) to ~325 VIP media contacts
- electronic review copies on Edelweiss
- physical review copies offered to ~325 media contacts
- targeted publicity campaign coordinated with author
- in-person/virtual pitches to trade media
- submitted for major book and literary festivals (Bay Area Book Festival, Brooklyn Book Festival, Portland Book Festival, etc)
- author featured in in-house produced media, such as the Line/Break interview series
- electronic newsletters sent to in-house list of individual poetry consumers (15k)
- displayed at appropriate conferences, including AWP
- submitted to all relevant awards and prizes
- included in in-house designed PDF catalog
- publicity amplified on Press’s robust social media accounts
- GoogleAds
