April Yee
is a writer and translator whose poetry, fiction, and essays have won or been listed for Best of the Net, The Best American Essays, the Ivan Juritz Prize, and the Manchester Poetry Prize. A Harvard alumna and former journalist, she reported in more than a dozen countries at sites ranging from Chernobyl to Iraqi oil fields before moving to London, where she has served as The Georgia Review’s editor-in-residence, Refugee Journalism Project mentor, and trustee at Spread the Word.Her work on interests such as racial fraud and reproductive autonomy is in The Times Literary Supplement, The Offing, and Electric Literature, and she has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Southbank Centre, the National Book Critics Circle, the Community of Writers, Ledbury Poetry Critics, and the University of East Anglia, where she was the Malcolm Bradbury Memorial Scholar. Collaborators have transformed her work into song, video, visual art, and sound installation.
Selected Writing
- A Cultural History of Racial Fraud [essay in Electric Literature; Longreads Editors' Pick and Best American Essays Notable]
- My Blues [essay in The Offing; Best of the Net; Best American Essays notable]
- Information in Isolation [essay in Entropy; Mendocino Coast Writers' Conference Prize winner]
- Man in Paradise [essay in Source Magazine; winner of the inaugural Writing Prize]
- Fire [fiction in Visual Verse]
- When This Is Over [poem transformed into a song by Emily Manuel]
Criticism on work by Monica Youn; Helen Mort, Clare Shaw, and Anita Pati; Don Mee Choi and Kim Hyesoon; Nuzhat Bukhari and Kayo Chingonyi; Rahul Raina and Alex McElroy; Yusef Komunyakaa and Douglas Kearney; Gabrielle Bates and Matthew Salesses; Lee Isaac Chung; Claudia Rankine, Eduardo C. Corral, and Valzhyna Mort; Hassan Blasim; Raven Leilani and Xiaolu Guo.Interviews with Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Chang-rae Lee, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Carribean Fragoza, Richard Ovenden, Kiare Ladner.Poems or translations in SAND Journal, The Offing, The Rialto, Shenandoah, Ambit, Harana Poetry, LUMIN Journal, The Seventh Wave, perverse, Wild Court, Lunch Ticket.Journalism on strippers at Harvard, the Libyan transition from the Gaddafi regime, Vietnamese shrimpers in New Orleans, the two most recent French presidents, pollution in the Ohio River, a once-in-a-century contest for oil rights in the Middle East, the 2008 American presidential election, and Florida courts depriving non-English-speaking defendants of translators.
Events

- Bodies Unbound in Conversation with Red Canary Song [Chinatown Biennial, 16 October 2021]
- Leven Street Press [Glasgow Open House Arts Festival, 24 September 2021]
- Bodies Unbound: Reinscribing the Testimony of Colonial Sex Workers [Oxford Centre for Life Writing, 6 August 2021]
- Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal launch [7 July 2021]
- Activism and protest [BBC Radio Norfolk, 25 June 2021]
- Echoes [Norwich Fringe Festival, 18 March 2021]
- Crossing Boundaries: A Prose Mash-up [San Miguel Literary Sala, 4 March 2021]
- LC Lunch [Live Canon, 12 February 2021]
- Transnational Literature and Writing: Follow the Sun [Bath Spa University, 28 January 2021]
- Imagining Identity Across the Pond [Asian American Writers' Workshop, 23 January 2021]
Contact
To pitch poetry books for review, please email Ledbury Critics' Dave Coates at dcoates [at] liverpool.ac.uk.To pitch fiction, nonfiction, and other books for review, please fill out this form.For other messages, please use the form below.