Sally Wen Mao
Photo courtesy of Sally Wen Mao
Bio
Sally Wen Mao is the author of Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry, and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). The winner of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Lannan Foundation, she has recent poems published or forthcoming in Poetry, the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, Tin House, Harpers Bazaar, A Public Space, and the New Republic, among others. Mao was a 2016-2017 fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the 2017-2018 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at George Washington University, and a 2021 Black Mountain Institute Shearing Fellow.
This year has been incredibly difficult for a great many of us. I want to say that poetry can provide a balm or heal, but it’s not always that simple. It’s not always true. All I know is that where there seems to be no place to funnel one’s emotional pain or hurt or rage, poetry can provide that imagined space, that illuminated room.
Earlier this year, I was stranded during a pandemic. I did not have stable income and have not for years, and that daily struggle and sacrifice is something I think about, in my choice to pursue poetry—why do it? My family laments. Why choose that precariousness? At the time, I felt lost thinking about this choice. No matter where I go, I struggle in the search for hearth and home, and it’s something I am considering, interrogating, and excavating in my next collection of poems.
One thing that this fellowship would provide is a much-needed respite from this constant struggle—and the chance to establish my own definition of home, and extend that to others in my community. If anything, I have learned that a poet can chart the unknown and still make a home of it. Poetry invents a space where impossible things are suddenly more possible. In this space, you are sheltered, you are seen.