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About the author

Mai Mang (Yibing Huang) was born in Changde, Hunan, China, in 1967, and inherited Tujia ethnic minority blood from his mother. He grew up in his southern hometown during the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. From 1983 to 1993 he studied at Beijing University, receiving his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in Chinese Literature. During the same decade he also quickly established himself as a poet and was closely associated with a new generation of young poets who were based in Beijing. Mai Mang moved to the U.S. in 1993 and holds a second Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been an assistant professor of Chinese at Connecticut College since 2000.

Mai Mang's second dissertation, "From Orphans to Bastards: The Legacy of the Cultural Revolution and Contemporary Chinese Allegories of the Individual," is based on case studies of the generation of writers which spent its formative years during the Cultural Revolution and focuses on this generation's identity shift from "orphans of history" to "cultural bastards."

His research interests cover a broad range, including modern and contemporary Chinese literature, cinema and popular culture, comparative studies of modernism and postmodernism in China and in the West, and cultural translations between Chinese poetry and modern American poetry.

He has received research fellowships from the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China, Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Mai Mang has an impressive record of publications and conference presentations, in both China and the U.S. An article published in Amerasia Journal in 2001, "Duoduo: An Impossible Farewell, or, Exile between Revolution and Modernism," is a study of one of the most acclaimed contemporary Chinese poets, Duoduo, who started his underground writing in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution and now lives in Europe in exile.

Mai Mang's poetry work has been published in China since the 1980s, and has been collected into many prestigious anthologies, such as The Anthology of Beida Poetry (1978-1998), The Best Chinese Poetry 1998, The Annual Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry 1998, The Anthology of Major Chinese Poets in the 1990s, and The Best Chinese Poetry 2003. He has given poetry readings at many different occasions in China. He and his poetry were also featured in an article "Along L.A. River, Poetic Inspiration," in the Los Angeles Times (April 17, 2001).