Poetry

A 2019-20 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination and the inaugural writer-in-residence at Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Fiona Sze-Lorrain has been supported by fellowships from Yaddo, Ledig House Writers Omi, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and Women's International Study Center, Santa Fe, among others.

She works as an editor at Vif Éditions, an independent press in Paris.

One of the founding editors at Cerise Press (2009-13), she served as a corresponding editor for Mãnoa (2012-14).

Her work has appeared in Antigonish, Granta, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Modern Poetry in Translation, New Humanist, New England Review, Salamander, Salmagundi, Two Lines, etc.

Read some of her recent poetry at Poetry London, New Humanist, Poetry Northwest, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

Find and view her selected poems in the Cahiers at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

Her poems have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese.

En français : Louvre | Poezibao

In italiano: Nuova Trauben | Testo a fronte (Leo S. Olschki) 

En español: MALBA | Granta | Revista Colofón | Calidoscopio 

中文：無形之眼 (雙語版) | 台北詩歌節 | 人間福報  

2024-25

Sze-Lorrain's poem "Towering" (from The Ruined Elegance) is part of the Poems on the MRT in Singapore, featured on a panel in MRT trains (the North-South and East-West lines) from November 1, 2024 to October 31, 2025. 

Read the full poem here, here, or here.

2021

A film Rain in Plural . . . and Beyond is available online.

Sze-Lorrain presents poems from her Rain in Plural, The Ruined Elegance, and My Funeral Gondola. She shares her ongoing processes of translation, music, and artmaking that are in parallel to her writing. She also reads bilingual poems and translations of Chinese contemporary poets Yin Lichuan and Ye Lijun, and American poet Mark Strand, as well as performs a classical piece High Moon 月儿高 on the guzheng.

Click to watch the video on Youtube:

Videography and Editing by Flavien Eripret
Editing, Mixing, Post-Production by Vernon Hughes
Collaboration by Emlyn Hughes

Also watch a filmed reading of the sequence poem, "Not Meant as Poems," performed by Oscar Olivo. 

2020

Sze-Lorrain's fourth collection, Rain in Plural, is published by Princeton University Press in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. 

Read the catalog press release.

Rain in Plural has been highlighted as a "starred review" by Library Journal in Longing and Speech: Nine Major Poetry Collections from Writers Veteran and New.

It was also a finalist for the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry.

Read Sze-Lorrain's essay "How Each Line Appears | some loose leaves" in Princeton Ideas.

Cartoons by Molly Peacock
 

2019

A joint exhibition of Sze-Lorrain's handwritten poems (ink and washi) and Fritz Horstman's ink paintings was held at the Institute Library in New Haven, Connecticut from June to September.  

View some of the artwork on Cahiers at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination. 

On the occasion of this summer exhibition, a catalogue A Blue Dark was published by Vif Éditions in a limited edition.  

2018

A limited edition of a pamphlet | chapbook (of Sze-Lorrain's sequenced poem) Not Meant as Poems was published by The Green Violin | Le Violon Vert in Montréal, Canada.

2015-16

Sze-Lorrain's third collection, The Ruined Elegance, was published by Princeton University Press in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets.

It was named one of Library Journal's Best Books of 2015: Poetry and its Top Fall Indie Poetry.

It was also a finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Read an interview on the Princeton University Press blog and a poem on Poetry Society of America.

*

A Taiwanese edition, Invisible Eye, contains a bilingual selection of Sze-Lorrain's poems (translated into Chinese by Ling Yu), and was released in Taipei in late 2015. 

2013

My Funeral Gondola is Sze-Lorrain's second book of poetry, published as a Mãnoa Books title from El León Literary Arts.

It was a finalist for the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards in Poetry.

2010

Her debut collection, Water the Moon, was published by Marick in February 2010.

It received an Honorable Mention for the 2011 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry.

---

Past Feature

Read a feature in Bitter Oleander (Volume 17, No. 2, Autumn 2011) and its reviews in Washington Independent Review of Books and NewPages.