Ching-In Chen

Shiny City

Ching-In Chen’s Shiny City examines the “real” and imagined history of Riverside, California’s Chinatown, juxtaposed with a speculative shiny city of the global future. Word by word, syntax by syntax, Chen projects the essential and unrecorded voices of the Chinese immigrants who picked and packed fruit in Riverside’s citrus groves and worked as house servants in the late 1800’s through the 1930’s, as well as the travelers and inhabitants of “shiny city” as they navigate its accelerated process of growth and decay. Both experimental and narrative, these poems juxtapose found texts with a singular kind of imagining: through a wild love, and despite an incomplete and fragmented archive, Shiny City reconstructs its own kind of history with beauty that emerges from between the cracks.

Cover design: Kenji C. Liu
ISBN:  978-1-950404-17-9
Paperback: $18
Publication date: November 1, 2025

Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems; and Shiny City as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. 

A Kundiman and Lambda Fellow, they have also been awarded residencies and fellowships from Callaloo, The Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Jack Straw Cultural Center, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Imagining America, EmergeNYC, the Intercultural Leadership Institute, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. 

Selected to be part of artEquity’s BIPOC Leadership Circle, Chen is an organizer with Massage Parlor Organizing Project and serves as a Seattle City of Literature board member, a Cultural Space Agency Governing Council member and a Kundiman board member. They have served as a mentor both for Alphabet Alliance of Color’s Leadership Institute and at Creature Conserve. They also organize with the Reorienting Reads collective to amplify diasporic Asian and Pacific Islander transgender, intersex, nonbinary and gender-expansive voices through community events, educational resources, and publishing projects. 

They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice. 

Chen is an associate professor in both the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and in the MFA program in creative writing and poetics at the University of Washington Bothell. They served as writer in residence at Hugo House 2022-2024. In 2023, Chen was appointed poet laureate of Redmond, Washington, through 2025. In 2024, Chen received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.

Praise for Shiny City

“Ching-In Chen’s poetic exploration of the history of the Chinese diaspora offers a powerful addition to the tradition of documentary poetics, which directly incorporates material from historical documents in order to plumb the depths of historical experience. Like the most important work in the field, Chen’s poetry does not just represent the historical record but critically interrogates it. In Shiny City we encounter figures familiar from the history of Chinese immigration to the U.S.: the houseboy, the miner, the laborer, the cook. Yet Chen presents these figures to the reader in a fractured formal landscape that renders them strange and new." - Timothy Yu, author of 100 Chinese Silences

“In what universe is Love its own spill of bedazzled-grit & cultural archives? Shiny City. Every poem is breath, is a sound, is a meditation—past & present, ancient & new skinned. Bruised & perfect.” – Anastacia-Renee, author of Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere

Excerpt from Shiny City

shiny city rummage

The city is made up of buttons. Pearly buttons, luminescent buttons, cranky buttons. Tiny buttons like teeth. Trumpet buttons with a clatter as a song. Buttons with handles. Buttons with holes in the middle where their hearts should be. Buttons desperate for transfusions. Buttons hoping to be zippers. Buttons masquerading as the tab of Coke cans.

Buttons searching for provisions. Shriveled and parched buttons desiring. Rejected buttons from the floor.

We eulogize buttons when the city goes down for the night.