Ken Chen served as the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop from 2008 to 2019. He is the recipient of the Yale Younger Poets prize, the oldest annual literary award in America, for his book Juvenilia, which was selected by the poet Louise Glück. An fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Bread Loaf, Chen cofounded the cultural website Arts & Letters Daily and CultureStrike, a national arts organization dedicated to migrant justice. His essay “Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show”—on the appropriations of Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place—became a key text in contemporary conversations about race and literature. A graduate of Yale Law School, he successfully defended the asylum application of an undocumented Muslim high school student from Guinea detained by the Department of Homeland Security.
