Quiet of Chorus

Vanessa Huang's first book of poemsbears witness to an intimate terrain traversing pasts, presents, and futures within and surrounding political movements to end various embodiments of the prison industrial complex in the 2000s, California, and beyond. Making refuge in diaspora, the poems in quiet of chorus inhabit and transform the poet's languages of heritage and migration into their own call-and-response syntax, inviting readers and listeners into prayer, pause, novel gesture towards freedom.

Born in Berkeley and home in diaspora from California and Taipei to Atlanta, New York, and Tianjin, Vanessa Huang is a poet, artist, and cultural worker whose practice inherits teachings from the prison industrial complex abolition, gender liberation, and intersecting social justice movements over the last decade. A finalist for Poets & Writers’ 2010 California Writers Exchange Award and the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize, quiet of chorus is Vanessa’s first book of poems.