(Un)Writing Place

​Join us for a lively conversation between author and journalist Lin Hierse and translator-scholar Dr. Jon Cho-Polizzi. Hierse’s writing navigates the complexities of life in contemporary Germany, exploring links between language, place, and belonging across generations. Her works are characterized by complex ambiguities, settings and narratives that compound and merge, demonstrating unexpected connections and continuities. Together they will discuss Hierse‘s explorations of German and Chinese entanglements in her writing, the role of Chinatowns across the diaspora, and the publication of her works in English translation in new and forthcoming anthologies.

Lin Hierse

Lin Hierse is a prolific author, journalist, poet, and public intellectual. With a background in Asian Studies and Human Geography, she is a longtime contributor to several major German journals and periodicals; she wrote the biweekly column “Poetical Correctness” in taz from 2020-2023. Her acclaimed autofictional debut novel Wovon wir träumen [What We Dream Of] was published in 2022 and follows the interconnected stories of three generations of women whose lives are ruptured and reunited through the experience of migration and life in the Chinese diaspora. It was followed in 2024 by her sophomore novel Das Verschwinden der Welt [The Disappearing World], a novel that chronicles the life of an aging tenement building in the outskirts of Shanghai: a one-time refuge for peasants from the Chinese countryside, it later became home to Jewish refugees during WW2, and new urban milieu following the Cultural Revolution, before falling into forgetfulness and disrepair with the rapid gentrification of the 21st-century city.

Jon Cho-Polizzi

Jon Cho-Polizzi is an award-winning literary translator and Assistant Professor of German at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Jon received a concurrent PhD from UC Berkeley in German and Medieval Studies in 2020. His work highlights the diversity of contemporary German literature at the intersections of migration and multilingualism. Jon's translation of Fatma Aydemir's Djinns received the Society of Author's 2025 Schlegel-Tieck Prize; his translation of Max Czollek’s De-Integrate: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century received the 2024 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. His translation of Ralph Tharayil's Roll Back the Mountains is forthcoming with Seagull Books.