ARTIST'S STATEMENT Sherry Quan Lee approaches writing as a community resource and as culturally based art of an ordinary everyday practical aesthetic. Her journey as a writer began before she was born; history plays an important part in who we are (her mother is "Negro" and her father is Chinese). Lines on her curriculum vitae show "opportunities and blessings" that focus and center her life as a writer. Between the lines are the stories she writes that are the process, the plot that literally move her forward. She is the artist and the art: textured, vibrant—visible. Sherry Quan Lee is a Community Writing Instructor at Metropolitan State University (she has taught Creative Writing for eight years); is a Program Associate for the Split Rock Arts Program; has taught at the College of St. Catherine; was a Loft Inroads mentor; participated in the Asian American Renaissance's Writers' Block Program for Asian youth; has been a consultant/teacher for SASE: The Write Place, etc (see resume). Her work has appeared in The Journal of the Asian American Renaissance, Drum Voices Review, Wolfhead Quarterly, Gypsy Cab, A Woman's Place, Loonfeather, Slate, Mother Journeys: Feminists Write About Mothering, Hurricane Alice, and elsewhere. She has read or performed at Patrick's Cabaret, the Loft, Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz, Black Bear Crossing, the National Teleconference for Women in Higher Education, Blue Moon Café, May Day Café, the Kitty Kat Klub, Vulva Riot, and elsewhere. She participated in the first Cave Canem writer's retreat for Black poets at Mt. St. Alphonsus. She earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, focusing on poetry and nonfiction, at the University of Minnesota. In 2004 she was named Distinguished Alumni at North Hennepin Community College.		"It's been a long time since I've been treated to a voice so full of honesty about one's struggle to come to terms with her identity. Through elegant poetry, full of exquisite imagery and detail, Quan Lee takes the reader on her personal, transformative journey, in which she explores how race, class, gender, and sexual identity inform who she is." —Carolyn Holbrook, Artistic Executive Director, SASE: The Write Place "Quan Lee eloquently expresses how painful and confusing it can be to embrace the many complex identities that one body can contain. With evocative imagery and words that cut straight to the heart, Quan Lee details her lifelong struggles with both the vagaries and concreteness of race, class, gender and sexual identity. Her guilt and shame are palpable. But so too are her emotional and intellectual triumphs. Like a favorite sad song when we have been dumped by the love of our lives, this volume will be oddly comforting to anyone who has ever been overcome by that sorrow which seems insurmountable." —Eden Torres, Assistant Professor Women's Studies, Chicano Studies, University of Minnesota
"And after you finish this book you will say to yourself, if you have any sense at all, this woman is a hero. This book is a gift. This book is a small and powerful miracle. If you read it with an open mind and heart, it will tell you much about America; it will tell you truths that are not there in our culture of mass media or in our canonized literature." —David Mura (from preface to CHINESE BLACKBIRD) Visit the Folio Bookworks site for more information. Read Sherry's interview with Asian American Press. Additional Resources: Asian American Poetry Cave Canem

© Sherry Quan Lee.

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.