[Event] Book Talk | Friendship as Creative Act with Stephanie Niu and Juliana Chang

Can friendship be a creative act? In this book talk, debut poets (and college roommates!) Juliana Chang and Stephanie Niu will discuss their publication journeys and explore the myriad of ways their writing has been intertwined with and influenced by friendship. Juliana and Stephanie will read from their debut collections, So Long This Wound Stayed Open and I Would Define the Sun, and discuss the ways friendship has shaped these works, whether editorially or emotionally, in order to ask: how can we make space for friendship in the creative process? What do we gain when creativity and community flourish together?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephanie Niu is a poet and writer from Marietta, Georgia. She is the author of I Would Define the Sun, which won the inaugural Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, and chapbooks Survived By (Host Publications, 2024) and She Has Dreamt Again of Water (Diode Editions, 2022). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Literary Hub, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Juliana Chang is a Taiwanese American poet. Her first full-length collection, So Long This Wound Stayed Open, was published with ELJ Editions in 2024. Juliana’s work appears in The American Poetry Review, The Chestnut Review, diode poetry journal, Burningword Literary Magazine, Best New Poets 2023, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Linguistics and an MA in Sociology from Stanford University, and a JD from Harvard Law School.