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“How do we share these stories that, in some ways, are just impossible to tell?” Tina Chang said at the beginning of her poetry reading.

On Nov. 3, the Harvard Department of English invited Tina Chang, New York-based poet, professor, and incoming creative writing instructor at Harvard — as well as Brooklyn’s first female Poet Laureate — to give a Morris Gray Poetry Reading at the Barker Center.

Following the poetry reading, Harvard English and African and African American Studies Professor Tracy K. Smith ’94 moderated a discussion between Chang and Hồng-Ân Trương, a visual artist and Professor of Art at UNC Chapel Hill.

The event was attended by students, Harvard faculty, booksellers, and other fans of Chang’s work.

One volunteer staff member, Sam G. Norcross, is a Porter Square Books bookseller who discovered an interest in Chang’s work online.

“It just seemed like she has a lot of really current, vibrant interest in politics — in the political and the personal simultaneously, in a way that comes through in her work interestingly,” Norcross said.

Chang began the reading with her third poetry collection, “Hybrida,” released in 2019. She discussed some of her inspirations: folkloric myth, the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales, and more importantly, her mixed-race son.

“‘Hybrida’ was created in the years that my son was growing up — and the book really focuses attention on raising a mixed-race Black child. And as I was raising him, I thought about my love for him, but also placing him in the world one day to be an independent being — and would he be protected?” Chang said.

Chang followed her description of “Hybrida” with a reading of “Fury,” a poem from the collection that Chang wrote following a grand jury’s refusal to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2024.

Chang’s previous works do not shy away from the political — and “Lion,” her forthcoming collection of poems, continues to delve into America’s racial climate.

However, Chang herself insists that “Lion” started off with no clear direction.

“I love these conversations that start off with, ‘I’m making something, but I don’t know what it is.’ So for the longest time, when I was making this book, “Lion,” I had no idea where it was going,” Chang said.

In an interview with The Crimson after the event, Chang elaborated on the inspiration behind the namesake of her collection, which is scheduled to release on Sept. 1, 2026.

“I think of the lion as a symbolic figure, both as an animal that stalks and preys, as well as its opposite, which is a symbol of power and voice and resilience. Classically, it is male, but I claim it as female in the work. It just became a guiding symbol for me in the work of finding voice when one is questioned and being silenced,” Chang said.

During her talk, Chang recounted the string of anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic following President Trump’s description of COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” — specifically, the murder of Christina Yuna Lee in her Chinatown apartment in early 2022 — that began to guide her writing process.

Made much in response to the fear she and many Asian-Americans felt during the COVID-19 pandemic, “Lion” consists of many poems initially created as private “responses” to the works of many artists, including Trương. These art pieces were originally collected in a group exhibition honoring Lee’s death, titled “With her Voice, Penetrates Earth’s Floor.”

“What happened was, I engaged privately with all their work. I was really in a state of dismay and fear during the pandemic. I really didn’t even want to leave my home, for fear that something was going to happen,” Chang said.

In Chang’s discussion with Trương and Smith, Chang and Trương went back-and-forth in an analysis diving into a series of video stills from archival films recorded by American and Australian soldiers wandering the streets of Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

“In these films that I was watching, they would sort of stop on these women and voyeuristically follow the women for five or ten seconds,” said Trương.

Trương noted the fetishistic gaze towards Asian women in many of these films.

“It was a very particular kind of Orientalizing gaze that I was really struck by and my kind of intervention into the moving image was really about stilling that moment to make them be a primary character,” Trương said.

Rhiannon V. Gentile, a Faculty Assistant in the Department of English, found Trương’s perspective particularly powerful.

“The way that [Trương] connected [the video stills] to her mother as well I thought was incredibly thoughtful and pulled at my own heartstrings because all of our mothers had these stories,” Gentile said.

Before moving into the Q&A portion of the event, Chang echoed the influence of the Asian female experience on her work, specifically her mother and grandmother.

“It was always the women that stayed, that lived, that persisted, who survived. They’re very, very strong in the lineage,” Chang said. “They kept us going. I think that that strong female energy specifically runs through this most recent collection, ‘Lion.’”