Join us for the launch of The Orange Tree, the multilingual and transnational poet and translator Dong Li’s debut poetry collection from the relaunched Phoenix Poets series at the University of Chicago Press. Winner of the inaugural Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize, The Orange Tree braids forgotten legends,personal sorrows, and political upheavals into a cinematic account of Chinese history as experienced by one family. Amid chaos and catastrophe, the child narrator examines a yellowed family photo to find resemblances and learns a new language, inventing compound words to conjure and connect family stories. Weaving through stories of people with little means, between wars and celebrations, over bridges and walls, and between trees and gardens, Li’s poems offer intimate perspectives on times that resonate with our own. The result is an unflinching meditation on family history, collective trauma, and imaginative recovery.

Advance reviews:

“The Orange Tree is, simply put, transformative.” — Booklist starred Review

“With a translator’s precision and an ethnographer’s comprehensiveness, The Orange Tree narratesgenerations of a family’s 20 th -century history.” — Poetry Foundation

Poet Forrest Gander will introduce Dong, who will then read from the collection. A conversation with

Forrest and a Q&A will follow the reading.

Bios of the participants:

Dong Li is a multilingual poet and translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. Born and raised in China, he was educated at Deep Springs College and Brown University. He’s the recipient of fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Deutscher Übersetzerfonds, Camargo and Humboldt Foundations, MacDowell, PEN/Heim Translation Fund, Yaddo, and others. His English translations include The Gleaner Song (Giramondo, Deep Vellum, 2021) by the Chinese poet Song Lin and The Wild Great Wall (Deep Vellum, 2018) by the Chinese poet Zhu Zhu. His debut collection of original English poetry, The Orange Tree, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in March 2023 as the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.

Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and grew up, for the most part, in Virginia. Trenchant periods of his life were spent in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo (Mexico), and Eureka Springs, Arkansas. With degrees in both geology and English literature, Gander is the author of numerous books of poetry, translation, fiction, and essays. A U.S. Artists Rockefeller fellow, Gander has been recipient of grants from the NEA, the Guggenheim, Howard, Witter Bynner and Whiting foundations. His 2011 collection Core Samples from the World was an NBCC and Pulitzer Prize finalist for poetry, and his 2018 collection Be With won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and was longlisted for the National Book Award.