Episode 77: Tina Chang
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Rachel Zucker speaks with poet and professor Tina Chang about her new book, Hybrida, how re-envisioning fairytales led to the writing of her new poems about raising a mixed-race black child in a post-Trayvon Martin era, about real and imagined fears of motherhood, and what it means to write in a language of mothers that is not a language of ownership. Chang talks about learning the rules of poetry (and traditional forms) and later searching for more flexible (female? maternal?) forms like the zuihitsu that might contain shopping lists and hyperlinks and also help us speak about race, history and violence. Chang and Zucker also discuss teaching, literary influences and the effect on their mothering of having been intermittently separated from their own mothers at a young age.
Books by Tina Chang
Hybrida (W.W. Norton, 2019)
Of Gods & Strangers (Four Way, 2011)
Language for a New Century [Editor, alongside Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar] (W.W. Norton, 2008)
Half-Lit Houses (Four Way, 2004)
Other Texts and Writers Mentioned in this Episode
Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (Picador, 2000)
“With the Birth of My Son, I Stopped Hiding”—Tina Chang’s Modern Love Column
Other Relevant Links
