Evan Wang (王潇) was the 9th National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, the first male and Chinese individual to hold this title, and the author of Slow Burn (Northwestern University Press, 2026), which made history as the youngest-ever recipient of the prestigious Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. A GLAAD 20 under 20 honoree, Wang’s work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Poets.org, The Poetry Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere, and is taught internationally across Canada, Nigeria, and Turkey. Deemed a “prodigy” by Teen Vogue, Wang has been recognized by The White House, the Academy of American Poets, and more.

Wang has been invited to perform and speak at the U.S. Department of Education, the Smithsonian Museum, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the Miami Book Fair, and the Wawa Welcome America Festival to audiences of over 500,000 people. In 2025, Wang was celebrated at the United Nations Headquarters on International Youth Day and spoke at Google’s AI for Learning Forum in London, where he met former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Sir Tony Blair. Featured in Poetry & The Creative Mind 2026 alongside Maggie Rogers and Chloé Zhao, Wang recently collaborated with Rome Prize-winning composer Baldwin Giang to create “We Are Made Foreign,” an original choral piece premiered by the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia in June 2026.