The Poetics of Shapeshifting: Master Class with Grace Zhou
Grace Zhou’s background as an anthropologist distinguishes her from many contemporary writers, yet it also aligns her with an older literary tradition: members of the leisure class who found their identities and relationships replicated in the patterns of the natural world. By moving across varied landscapes to illuminate cultural experience, Zhou reclaims nature not as a pastime of aristocratic privilege, but as a practice that restores dignity to the natural world while opening new avenues for self-expression.
This generative workshop asks you to slip the skin of the fixed self, to dissolve, to transform. We will look at, and write, poems that molt, that blur at the edges, that speak in tongues borrowed from rivers and foxes and the underworld's dark. Drawing on the great shapeshifters of myth—from Persephone to Daji to Lady Bai—we will channel spectral and ancestral voices, and explore what it means to transform on the page, to let a poem change its form mid-breath.
Grace H. Zhou is a poet, anthropologist, and educator. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Narrative Magazine, The Margins, Ninth Letter, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Soil Called a Country, was selected for Newfound’s 2023 Emerging Poets Series. Her debut poetry collection, diasporous, is winner of the 2025 St. Lawrence Book Award and will be forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2027. She teaches at the University of Edinburgh.
Weaving botanical epistles with dreamscapes, road trips, and hauntings, Soil Called a Country reimagines the American West through personal, familial, and historical experiences of the Chinese diaspora. In her debut chapbook selected for the 2023 Emerging Poets Series, poet and anthropologist Grace H. Zhou probes what it means to make a home as an immigrant in a settler colonial nation. Through a speculative poetics of repair, she asks: How to tread softly, dream otherwise, create space for our elsewheres?