Joanna Chen
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Joanna Chen is a writer and literary translator from Hebrew to English. Her full-length translations include Tehila Hakimi’s Hunting in America (winner of the Paper Brigade Award 2023) , Yonatan Berg’s Frayed Light (finalist for the National Jewish Awards) and Meir Shalev’s My Wild Garden. Her own poetry and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Monthly, Lilith and numerous other publications. She teaches literary translation at The Helicon School of Poetry in Tel Aviv. Joanna Chen is Yetzirah’s International Poetry Curator, a member of the Senior Partners Council and co-host of Yetzirah’s Jerusalem chapter.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
Judaism doesn\’t shape my poetry as doctrine so much as inheritance — a way of reading the world through layered, contested texts. Translating Hebrew poetry, and Arabic poetry too, has taught me that meaning lives in the gaps between languages, much as it lives in the gaps between generations.
Published Works
Translations
Less Like a Dove (Shearsman Press, 2016)
My Wild Garden (Penguin Random House, 2020)
Frayed Light (Wesleyan Univeristy Press Poetry Series, 2019)
but first i call your name (Shearsman Press, 2022)
Ham’s Heaven (Warbler Press, 2025)
Hunting in America (Penguin Random House/Footnote Press, 2025)
Love and Other Enchantments (Union Square & Co, 2026)
Fate (Other Press, 2026)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Current Title
Education
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (BA)
Bar Ilan University (MA)