My engagement with poetry began in early childhood, when I was drawn to the tonal structure and layered emotional currents of classical Chinese verse. By the time I was in middle school, I was experimenting with the revival of imagery elements from Song dynasty ci forms in contemporary Chinese poetry, earning national recognitions. Later, at Amherst College, I turned to English-language poetry, where I found kinship in the spare clarity of Robert Frost and the interior radiance of Emily Dickinson, two poets whose lives and work were deeply tied to the same hills and winters I was coming to know. It was also at Amherst that I began writing translingual poems, shaped by my mentor and friend Ilan Stavans. These poems move between and across Chinese and English, combining the syntactic rhythms and metaphoric logics of both languages to form a hybrid poetic field—both familiar and estranging, grounded and open.

Photography emerged as a companion to my writing, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when I was one of the few students who remained on campus in rural western Massachusetts. In the stillness of that time, I began walking daily through empty woods and open fields, photographing what the eye might otherwise pass over: a shadow cast across old stone, frost gathered at the edge of a branch, light filtering through windowpanes. The images often served as anchors for my poems but soon took on a language of their own: visual meditations that held presence, silence, and suggestion.

That period led to an unexpected learning opportunity. When the official Amherst College photographer was unable to access campus due to pandemic restrictions, I was invited to step in as a guest photographer. Over the next three years, under the guidance of senior photographer Maria Stenzel, to whom I am forever grateful, I contributed over 300 photographs to the College’s publications and social media. Photography became a way not just of seeing, but of sharing: offering those far from campus a vicarious visual connection to a place suspended in time. I also collaborated with historian and photographer George Qiao on Memorial Hill 2020, a documentary project exploring landscape and memory, which reinforced my understanding of photography as both witness and interpretation.

Since then, I have produced five photo books, including photo essays, poetic image sequences, and abstract studies. Each is grounded in a theme: solitude, migration, mathematical order, poetic serendipity. My poetry similarly moves across boundaries of genre, discipline, and language, with work published by The Common, University of Toronto Press, Cambridge University Press, and others. I’ve recited original poems at institutional occasions, including the bicentennial celebration of Amherst College and the inauguration of Amherst College’s 20th president, Michael A. Elliott; served as a guest poet at the Emily Dickinson Museum; delivered Ted talk on poetry and social media; and contributed as poet and editor to Poets Unite Worldwide, an international collective of poets responding to global concerns through shared poetic language. I’ve also lectured on “Chinese Socio-politics Through Poetry,” a series that explores poetic language as a form of social witness.

In all of these projects, I return to a core idea: that language and image are not separate pursuits but twin forms of perception. My training in law and economics deepens this inquiry, offering tools for structural understanding, while my creative practice invites me to dwell in ambiguity, tension, and transformation. Whether I’m composing a poem, capturing a photograph, hiking through unfamiliar terrain, or singing opera as a Baritone, I try to pay attention to the moment before meaning crystallizes—when the world still surprises, and connection begins.

I am currently based in Boston, continuing my creative and scholarly work. My ongoing projects include Forms of Correspondence, a photo-poetic meditation on language, distance, and relationship, as well as a landscape photography series exploring Boston and its shifting peripheries.