Carlina Duan
Poet
Carlina Duan is a Chinese-American poet and educator originally from Ann Arbor, MI. She’s a nationally acclaimed poet whose poems have appeared in POETRY, Poets.org, and The Kenyon Review, among other places. Her book, Alien Miss, focuses on Chinese American archival history, and on the experience of growing up as a bilingual daughter of immigrants. During her undergrad at the University of Michigan, she co-edited what became Michigan in Color: a column of The Michigan Daily written by and for people of color. Currently, she’s an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Carolina Chapel Hill.
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[Editor’s note]: Carlina is the poetry instructor that changed my life at the University of Michigan. She showed me that a creative career is possible. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be here. This project exists because of her.
This interview has been edited for length & clarity. It took place on March 24, 2025.
Q: Tell me about your journey to becoming a poet.
CD: I’ve always loved writing. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a journalist because I thought that was the most visible career path if you loved storytelling. But in high school, my journalism teacher (Jeff Kass) happened to also be a poet. Jeff would invite living contemporary poets to our class to give readings. At 14, I was so awed hearing poetry read aloud by poets like Aracelis Girmay and Patrick Rosal. It was also my first time realizing there existed living poets of color, including children of immigrants, like me, who were writing and publishing books of poems.
Jeff was the first person who called me a poet. I remember hearing a voice call after me in the high school parking lot: “Hey poet! Hey poet!” That meant so much and started me on my journey of falling in love with poetry.
I started going to poetry workshops after school at The Neutral Zone, a youth arts center in Ann Arbor. During my undergrad at the University of Michigan, I majored in creative writing. College was the first time I embraced my identity as a Chinese-American woman and the eldest daughter of immigrants. I started writing around questions of belonging and place. Post-grad, I wanted to keep thinking through these questions, but I knew I had to be somewhere that wasn’t Michigan to push my thinking around those questions.
I went to rural Malaysia on a Fulbright scholarship to teach English. That was such an important experience for me because I was around a Chinese diaspora, but I wasn’t in China or the U.S. It gave me a new context to understand colonial history and what it means for me to write in English. After Malaysia, I waitressed and taught creative writing workshops. In those two years, I started actually living through the questions I had asked on a more intellectual level in school. But I knew I wanted to write more. That’s what led me to get an MFA at Vanderbilt.
During my MFA, I started having questions about teaching poetry alongside identity and history. That’s what led me to pursue a PhD at U-M in English and education. When I reflect on every stage of the journey, it’s a different constellation of questions. At the root of these questions, there’s always this obsession with understanding belonging, place, and self rooted in my experience as a Chinese-American Midwesterner.
"In a time where it feels like writing shouldn’t matter, I read a poem and it reminds me of the flame of desire and life that’s deeply buried inside myself."
Credit: Room Project
Q: How has poetry transformed how you engage with the world?
CD: Poetry invites us to slow down and read the world with so much attention and care: how something as small as a period or line break can teach us about breath and pause and meaning-making. In this way, poetry has taught me to be a student of the world with the same deep attention.
Recently, I’ve been interested in documentary poetry: a genre of poetry that involves weaving in forms of language from different documents, such as immigration paperwork or a nutrition label. It’s poets reading other forms of language that are not traditionally poetic and incorporating it within the space of the poem. Poets recontextualizing language in this way has encouraged me to constantly immerse myself in the world and ask questions about it.
Especially now, poetry gives me hope in a time of precarity. In a time where it feels like writing shouldn’t matter, I read a poem and it reminds me of the flame of desire and life that’s deeply buried inside myself. There’s something that feels deceptively extraordinary about the power of a poem.
Poetry has taught me how to sit in ambiguity. There’s a quote by Elizabeth Alexander: “Many things can be true at once.” I think poetry is a place where poets are grappling with uncertainty and liminal space. Poems are not about finding neat conclusions, but when you can’t find a bow to tie around things, what do you do?
Q: What creative practices do you have that nourish you?
CD: A few years ago when I felt creatively stuck, I had a friend who made me a “play list”: a handwritten list of different activities that invited play.
Things like: make chocolate milk with cold milk and chocolate syrup. Walk to the river and skip a stone. Ever sine then, I’ve tried to center play in my creative practice. I’m always trying to learn a different creative medium outside of poetry. Especially since my day-to-day life as a poetry professor is so full of poetry, it’s important for me to take a break. Last fall, I learned how to knit. I also love collaging — the process reminds me of poetry.
Recently, I’ve been inspired by my grandfather to start transcribing texts I love by other writers. My grandfather survived the Cultural Revolution. Much of his life is a mystery to me, but he left behind a bin of books filled with handwritten transcriptions of writing he loved. Now, anytime I find language that’s particularly striking, I try to write it down by hand. It puts me in the mind space of: “How did someone build a sentence like this?”
Every April, I also do 30/30 (a poem for every day of National Poetry Month). I do this together with a poet friend. We have an accountability Google Doc we add our poems to every Sunday.
Carlina Duan's writing desk in Ann Arbor, MI
Q: How do you find community in your field?
CD: For me, I can’t detach community from poetry. In high school, I was on a citywide all-female slam poetry team that went to nationals. So my earliest memories of poetry are writing alongside other women, snapping, and just being so excited by the language we were creating.
In the U.S., there’s a lot of cultural weight placed on the East & West coast as places of creative production, but I’ve found the Midwest to be full of creative community. I think that Midwest artists are doing some of the most innovative and exciting work right now. The Midwest is often overlooked, yet there’s so much generosity and warmth in the community you find there.
I’ve found community just by showing up and being lucky. In Ann Arbor, I was a part of a writers group that writer A.H. Kim put together. In Detroit, I was part of a space previously known as “Room Project” for female and nonbinary artists in Southeast Michigan. I’ve found that community just opens to more community: like a garden, continuously growing.
Q: How do you define success?
CD: Success to me feels like deep joy and humility. I feel most moved when I’m able to work with poets who are my students and be inspired by what they’re creating. What’s rewarding to me is not how much I get published, but being a part of my students’ journeys and seeing them grow.
Q: What does being an Asian-American artist mean to you?
CD: It means I carry my histories with me wherever I go. That includes stories about my grandparents and my particular positionalities/excitements about Asian American folklore. It also nuances my orientation toward language as a bilingual speaker who speaks both Mandarin Chinese and English.
English was not my first language. But when I started going to school, I lost fluency in my mother tongue. The fact that I don’t have a neutral relationship to English informs the way I teach now. I hope to create classroom spaces where, no matter where you come from, you know there’s a space for you here.
Q: What advice do you have to aspiring writers or to your past self?
CD: Chase your curiosity and let it lead you where it wants to go.
Sometimes we have a very pragmatic way of thinking where we’re like: “I don’t have time for poetry. It won’t serve me in the job market. What critical skills will it give me?” But ultimately, poetry and other art forms spark curiosities that serve you in the long run. Trust your imagination — it will lead to more offerings and learnings. Don’t be afraid to ask difficult questions and listen to your questions. Sometimes, the older we get, it’s easy to dismiss our curiosity. But once you dismiss that voice, it’s harder to hear it.
I recently found poems that I wrote when I was 18 years old. It was embarrassing, but also beautiful — there was this unruliness and feral excitement. My advice to my younger self is to stop listening so much to the voices around me. To listen to myself more. Relax more and play more, don’t be go-go-go all the time.
"Trust your imagination, it will lead to more offerings and learnings. Don’t be afraid to ask difficult questions and listen to your questions. Sometimes, the older we get, it’s easy to dismiss our curiosity. But once you dismiss that voice, it’s harder to hear it."
Descent, a poetry video by Carlina Duan exhibited at Crooked Tree Arts Center