Reading with Winniebell Xinyu Zong, 2025 Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award Winner for Poetry

Join Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism for a reading with Winniebell Xinyu Zong, 2025 Poetry Winner of the Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award. Winniebell will be reading her award-winning poem, "Translations of Ba’s Recipe for COVID Prevention," which the Meridians Creative Writing Advisory Board has described as "part directive, part prayer, the words of this poem highlight the real-time precarity of the pandemic, which in turn renders the labors and sacrifices made to create a type of closeness/intimacy, which in its cruel paradox, is the very thing that kills. This poem is as much of a panacea, as it is a dispatch, as it is a recipe—it provides a type of clarity and nourishment in a time of bone-deep, existential darkness and hunger." 

Winniebell Xinyu Zong is a Chinese poet and chapbook editor at Newfound Press. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, swamp pink, and The Southern Review, among others, and had been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, Best of Net, and AWP’s Intro Journals Project. Winner of the Meridians Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award and the Mellon Fellowship for the Urban Justice Lab, Zong taught creative writing as a lecturer at Cornell University, where she received her MFA. She currently serves as the ‘24-‘25 Jay C. & Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.