Preface

Earlier this year, I watched The Verse of Us, a 2017 documentary chronicling the lives of Chinese working-class poets. I was moved by the verses they wrote beside assembly lines and inside coal mines. One detail stuck with me: of the six featured poets, only one was a woman. Nearly a decade later, I find myself wondering where the female worker-writers are today, and what drives them to write.

I began searching through poetry accounts, labor forums, and social media platforms where people posted after long workdays. I found far more writing than I had expected, much of it by women. I reached out to some of these writers, and our conversations led me to a wide range of backgrounds and life stories. With their permission, I began bringing their work—both poetry and prose—to English-speaking readers, hoping to share their voices with a wider audience. This e-magazine grew naturally out of that process.

This summer, a grant from my high school to explore a social issue of my choice allowed me to meet the people behind these texts. I produced Her Verse, a documentary following two of these female worker-poets, as a tribute to the film that first inspired my exploration. The camera captured the rhythm of their days, but it also convinced me that images alone could not carry their voices. A documentary records their lived reality; their written words deserve a space of their own.

That space now offers four ways of engaging with these writers and their work. Issues is a growing bilingual archive of poetry and prose, with each monthly issue devoted to one writer and her work in Chinese and English. Film presents Her Verse, a portrait of two writers’ everyday lives, exploring what literature means to them. Dialogues features conversations with the writers about the books that have shaped them, while Insights offers close readings of their language, imagery, and form.

These writers create in the stolen cracks of the day, in rooms where rest is always cut short. What they produce in those moments is not just evidence of a hard life; it is literature. This e-magazine begins with that belief, and honors their words on every page.