Lilacs on the waste land / 荒原上的丁香

Poetry Reading by American and Chinese poets/美中诗人朗诵会

Featuring Wang Jiaxin, Margo Taft Stever, Xiaohong, Dong Sun,Lei Rao, Ann Lauinger, Guohua Li, and Lu Fangkai

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
	—T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land

Margo Taft Stever

Margo Taft Stever’s full length collections include The End of Horses (Broadstone Books, 2022), winner of a 2022 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award; Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019) shortlisted with honorable mention for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize; and Frozen Spring (2002 Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry). In 2025, her chapbook BAREBACK RIDE will be published by Broadstone Books. With Susana H. Case, she edited I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, which was a winner of the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize and a Pinnacle Achievement Award. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Plume, Verse Daily, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, Cincinnati Review, upstreet, and Salamander. She is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and currently serves on the HVVWC board of directors. She is the founder and current editor of Slapering Hol Press. She teaches reading and poetry at Children’s Village, a residential school for at-risk children and adolescents in Dobbs Ferry, New York. (www.margotaftstever.com).

Ann Lauinger

Ann Lauinger’s books of poetry are Dime Saint, Nickel Devil (Broadstone Books, 2022) Against Butterflies (Little Red Tree, 2013), and Persuasions of Fall (U. of Utah, 2004), and she is a recipient of the Ernest J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace magazine and the Agha Shahid Ali Prize from the University of Utah. Her poems and translations have appeared in journals, such as The Cumberland River Review, Georgia Review, Parnassus, Southern Poetry Review, and Transference; in anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature; and on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. She holds a PhD in English literature from Princeton University and is now an emerita faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College, where she taught literature for many years.

Wang Jiaxin (王家新)

Wang Jiaxin is an eminent contemporary Chinese poet, essayist, and translator. His work has had an important influence on Chinese poetry. His collection of poems in English is Darkening Mirror (Tebot Bach, 2017), with a foreword by former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review,Words Without Borders, American Poets and The Kenyon Review, and he has been a poet-in-residence at the Dutch Literary Foundation (Amsterdam, 2022) and at the the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa(2013). He has won many domestic and international awards. John Crespi, Director of Asian Studies at Colgate University, has extolled his work：“Wang Jiaxin has exerted a far-reaching influence over contemporary Chinese poetry not just as a poet but also for his role as a critic and translator. Wang’s poetic voice stands out for the gravity, clarity, and resolve with which it explores the individual’s relation to history, destiny, cultural inheritance, and humanity.” Wang Jiaxin was a professor at Renmin University of China for years—he now lives most of his time in New York.

Xiaohong (李笑虹)

PhD in Physiology from Cambridge University, is currently the Director of the Neurobiology Laboratory at the New York State Institute for Basic Research. She is also the Vice President of the World Celebrity Association, Editor-in-Chief of the Poetry Magazine “Overseas Essence”. Her works have been published in a variety of paper and online publications and have been included in more than ten poetry collections. Xiaohong has won a number of national and international poetry awards and has published four personal poetry collections "Rainbow", "The Curve of the Wind", "Above Colors" and "The Depth of Light and Shadow".

Dong Sun（孙冬）

Professor at Nanjing University of Finance and Economics. Graduated from Nanjing University with Ph.D. degree in English literature; published a monograph, Against Interpretation: on the Indeterminacy of Sam Shepard’s Theater and three poetry books, The Cruel Crow (with Dong Feng), the Broken Crow and Writing Animals；edited a book Reciprocal Translation Project; translated two books To Tell and to Show and Buried Child, Three Plays by Sam Shepard. Dong Sun’s poems have been translated into French, English, Turkish and Romanian and published in various important literary magazines, newspapers and other online media outlets.

Lei Rao (饶蕾)

Lei Rao is a chemist and poet. She has published six poetry collections, two of which are bilingual edition in English and Chinese. Additionally, she has also published six illustration books for beginners. Her works have been included in more than 40 literary anthologies. She has won awards in numerous international poetry competitions in Chinese, including first place, second place, and honorable mentions.

Guohua Li（李国华）

Guohua Li is the M. Finster Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University and recipient of the Kenneth Rothman Epidemiology Prize and Guggenheim Fellowship. He grew up in a rural village of central China and came to the United States as a graduate student in 1989. As a bilingual poet-epidemiologist, he records thoughts and verses for beauty and studies morbidity and mortality for humanity. He is the editor and translator of Beauty That Is Never Old - Select American Poems (Tongji University Press, Shanghai, China, 2024) and author of the forthcoming book Gorman Ponds – A Haiku Journal (Austin Macauley Publishers, in press).

Fangkai Lü (吕芳凯)

Fangkai Lü is a poet from Jiangsu Province, China. Born in 1989, he now lives in the United States.