Evan Wang
王潇
Poet, performer, and advocate redefining the role of poetry in entertainment.
“Wang’s deftness in telescoping vast swathes of time, while sustaining both mythic and quotidian proportions for experience is remarkable.”
“‘Prodigy’ is not a word to be used lightly. Rarely does one come across a young person so exceptional in their ability that it feels worthy to give them a title with such implications of greatness. Evan Wang is undoubtedly worthy of the word.”
Evan Wang (王潇) is the 9th National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, the first male and Chinese individual to hold this title, and author of Slow Burn (Northwestern University Press, 2026), the youngest winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. His work appears in POETRY Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Waxwing, The Harvard Advocate, and elsewhere. He has been featured at and recognized by the Biden White House, the United Nations, Teen Vogue, the Smithsonian Institution, and Google DeepMind. Evan is a first-year student at Harvard College.
Slow burns like me fire,
or wink into nothing.
SLOW BURN
“Slow Burn limns the fissures of the self and its myriad contradictions with fervor and with startling emotional precision. These high-voltage poems will seize you, fueled as they are by sonic sensuousness and lush image-making. Wang’s bold intelligence and heart ignite each page.”
- Jenny Xie, author of Eye Level and The Rupture Tense
WINNER OF THE 2024 DRINKING GOURD CHAPBOOK POETRY PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE 2024 VINYL 45 CHAPBOOK PRIZE
“Evan Wang’s Slow Burn has managed what many poets strive their whole lives to achieve. These poems reach their fingers out and touch the contours of divinity. There is a holiness in each measured line. Wang writes, “I am all touch and no hands. But this is me / at my most beautiful.” Well, this is poetry at its most beautiful. How lucky are we? To witness the staggering depth of this new voice as it announces itself to the world. ”
- Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Whiting Award recipient
Persistent yet flickering, Slow Burn unveils a passionate world where love is both impossible and inevitable. Divided into three sections, Evan Wang’s debut chapbook traces the confrontation of the self through a cyclical journey of discovery and contradiction, ultimately leading to the choice of allowance: that which is made by the reader. These poems slowly burn first through our own inner silence, then through the thick dark of night, and finally to abstract closure—or lack thereof. They urge and hold us back, begging us to understand how, amid cultural, societal, and political suppression of the self, we kiss the muscled mouths of the world by carrying our bodies through it. Slow Burn is a romantic’s answer to the search for love, and the strangely comforting realization that the effects of the world mark us all.
