Xi Xi: (Cheung Yin) came to Hong Kong from Shanghai in 1950, and became one of the most famous writers in Hong Kong, and its most innovative poet. Her first work was published in 1955, when she was still a teenager, but she only gained widespread recognition in 1983, when a story won a prestigious prize in Taiwan. She has published 31 books (7 novels, 21 short story and essay collections, one novella, and two poetry collections), as well as newspaper and magazine columns, film theory and criticism, art criticism, translations, and screenplays. She graduated from the Grantham College of Education in 1958 and worked as a primary school teacher. In the 1960s she adopted Xi Xi as her pen name.
Jennifer Feeley: Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Iowa; Ph.D., Yale University, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (2008) M.Phil., Yale University, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (2004). Her research, teaching and writing interests include literary translation, modern Chinese literature and culture, modern and contemporary Chinese poetry, Chinese cinema and popular culture, and the poetry of Hong Kong, as well as translations of poems by Leung Ping-kwan, Zhu Zhu, Xi Xi, Zhou Zan, and Tang Danhong.
Jennifer Feeley is the translator of Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi, White Fox by Chen Jiatong, and Women Like Us by Wong Yi. In 2019 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship to translate Xi Xi’s semi-autobiographical work Mourning a Breast. She holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University and currently serves as a part-time Faculty Mentor in the International MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
