Joyce Chen

Joyce Chen is a writer, editor, and community builder who draws inspiration from many coastal cities. She is the current Hugo House writer-in-residence, and was a 2019-2020 Hugo House fellow. With her background in journalism, Joyce pens words that sit at the intersection of cultural criticism and personal essay. Her work has been published in Rolling Stone, Architectural Digest, Marie Claire, Paste magazine, the New York Daily News, and Los Angeles magazine, among others, and her literary writing has found homes in Poets & Writers, Lit Hub, Narratively, Barrelhouse, and Slant’d, among others. She has contributed book reviews to Orion and Hyphen magazines, and she’s received invaluable support through Hugo House, VONA, Tin House, Vermont Studio Center, and Centrum. Joyce is the executive director of The Seventh Wave, an arts and literary nonprofit that champions art in the space of social issues, and she is the co-editor of the anthology Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times, a collection of poetry paired with essays and life lessons, forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

Joyce is also currently at work on her memoir-in-essays, which examines the friction that arises from living with two sets of values that are often at odds with one another—the American ideals of independence and self-fulfillment and the Taiwanese values of family, community, and sacrifice—as experienced through different modes of time perception. She resides just south of Seattle with her partner, their tiny dachshund, and many leafy plants.