Creative Writing program alum Dr. Ching-In Chen (PhD, 2015) recently won a $50,000 fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. The award is part of a program that, in the words of the Academy, honors “laureates’ literary excellence while enabling them to undertake meaningful and innovative projects that enrich the lives of community members, including youth, through responsive and interactive poetry activities.” Dr. Chen was named poet laureate of Redmond, Washington in 2024 and teaches at the University of Washington-Bothell. Supported by the fellowship, Dr. Chen plans to “work with organizations that are part of the local food ecosystem to sponsor a community youth poetry gathering, with a focus on transgender, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-expansive poets. Dr. Chen will also solicit work from global poets through other UNESCO Cities of Literature and Gastronomy to share at these gatherings, and will print and distribute poetry postcards featuring these poems alongside the poems by local poets.