Xuefei Jin

Judged: Poem of the Year: May 2008 - Apr 2009

Xuefei Jin

Xuefei Jin (Ha Jin) grew up in mainland China and came to the United States in 1985 to do graduate work at Brandeis University. In 1990 he began to write in English exclusively. To date, he has published three volumes of poetry, Between Silences (1990), Facing Shadows (1996), and Wreckage (2001); and three books of short fiction, Ocean of Words (1996), which received the PEN/Hemingway Award; Under the Red Flag (1997), which received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and The Bridegroom (2000), which received The Asian American Literary Award (2001) and the Townsend Fiction Prize (2002). He has also written five novels: In the Pond (1998); Waiting (1999), which received the National Book Award (1999) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (2004), The Crazed (2002), War Trash (2004), the PEN/Faulkner Award (2005), A Free Life (2007), and a book of essays, The Writer as Migrant (2008). His collection of short stories, A Good Fall, will be published in November 2009. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Currently he is a professor of English at Boston University and lives in the Boston area.