Impossible Paradise

Chen Yuhong was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and graduated from the Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages. After a decade in Canada, she returned to Taiwan, settling in Taipei. For her 2004 collection Annotations, the editors of the annual Best Poetry of Taiwan named her Poet of the Year. Her collection Bewitched (2007) received Taiwan's Chinese Writers & Artists Association's Poetry Award. Her most recent poetry collection, Half-light, appeared in 2022 for which the Swedish Institute awarded Chen its International Cikada Prize in poetry.

George O'Connell, co-translator/co-editor with Diana Shi, has received numerous honors for his poetry, including Atlanta Review's International Grand Prize and the Pablo Neruda Award, as well as two US National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowships. He has also served as Fulbright professor to Peking University and National Taiwan University. Among his translations with Ms. Shi are Darkening Mirror by Wang Jiaxin; Crossing the Harbour: Ten Contemporary Hong Kong Poets; Passages: Thirteen Contemporary Taiwan Poets; Capriccio on the Way to Buy Salt, poems by Han Dong; and the forthcoming From Here to Here, poems by Lan Lan.

Diana Shi, co-recipient of two US National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowships, has collaborated since 2006 with George O'Connell in translating many prominent western and Chinese-speaking poets. In 2012 they launched Pangolin House, pangolinhouse.com, an international journal of poetry and art. Ms. Shi's extensive selections from American poet Arthur Sze's The Glass Constellation appeared in Chinese under the same title in 2023. Her translations from American poet Jane Hirshfield, I Wanted Only a Little, were published in 2024.