BIO
Poet Weijia Pan was born in Nanjing, China in 1996, where he grew up with his mother and grandparents. At the age of seven, Pan’s parents relocated to Shanghai. He attended an international high school, developing his passion for creative writing and Chinese literature. Pan earned his Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature and Chinese from UCLA and pursued his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in Poetry at the University of Houston. His first book, Motherlands, evolved from his dissertation and was selected by Louise Glück for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Pan has also served as an assistant editor of poetry for Gulf Coast and is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. In this interview, Pan shares about his early family life, adjusting to the cultural differences and language barrier in Shanghai, his varied experiences in academia, and his journey to pursuing a career in writing, He also discusses his teaching philosophy, process and craft, work as a translator, forays into combining different poetic traditions, and experience writing Motherlands. Finally, Pan reflects on his identity and current family life.