Dong Li

Born 1984 in Suzhou/China.

Dong Li holds an A.A. degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences from Deep Springs College, CA/USA as well as a B.A. degree in comparative literature and an M.F.A. in literary arts (poetry), both from Brown University, Providence, RI/USA.

Li’s poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Asia Literary Review, Asymptote, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Cincinnati Review, Circumference, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, Guernica, Hotel Amerika, H.O.W., Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, LVNG, North American Review, PEN America, Plume Poetry, Poor Claudia, Prelude, Quarterly West, Two Lines, The Volta, West Branch, World Literature Today and elsewhere. His work has been translated into German and appeared in manuskripte: Zeitschrift für Literatur. Dong Li was editor-at-large (China) 2014-2015 for the international translation journal Asymptote and hosted literary events in China. He also translates the American essayist Eliot Weinberger into Mandarin Chinese and Chinese poets Song Lin and Zhu Zhu into English. For his translation of the Chinese poet Song Lin, he was awarded a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. His book-length translation of the Chinese poet Zhu Zhu The Wild Great Wall will be published by Phoneme Media in late 2017. His trilingual anthology of American, Chinese and German poets in response to a poem by the late C.D. Wright will be forthcoming from Matthes & Seitz Berlin in late 2017.

Li has received fellowships from The Corporation of Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY/USA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst, VA/USA, OMI Ledig House International Arts Center, Ghent, NY/USA, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT/USA, Millay Colony, Austerlitz, NY/USA, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska City, NE/USA and DAAD at Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität Bonn and Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg as well as grants from the Whiting Foundation and Henry Luce Foundation. From 2013 to 2014 he received the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship at Colgate University, Hamilton, NY/USA. From 2015 to 2016 he was the German Chancellor Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Universiät Leipzig.