Ming Di

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Ming Di is a Chinese poet based in the US. The author of seven books of poetry in Chinese and one in collaborative translation, River Merchant’s Wife (2012), she has compiled and co-translated New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, Empty Chairs: Poems by Liu Xia, The Book of Cranes, and New Poetry from China 1917–2017. She has also co-guest-edited three issues of Mānoa. For her translation of English poetry into Chinese, she received the Lishan Poetry Award and the 10+ Translator Award in 2021 in China.

“Through Multiculturalism We Become Better Humans”: A Conversation with Vonani Bila

June 14, 2024 Ming Di
Vonani Bila with his mother and his son. Courtesy of Mark Waller, 2010.Vonani Bila (b. 1972) grew up in Shirley Village, Limpopo province, South Africa, from where he used to walk fourteen kilometers…
Indigenous-Minority Poets from China: 15 Recordings for International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples

August 9, 2023 Ming Di
Photo by Nicolas Winkler / Flickr To celebrate the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples on August 9, I invited fifteen Indigenous-minority poets from China to record their readings of t…
Literary Los Angeles

July 2023
Dana Gioia, Ming Di
Perpetually Demolished, Perpetually Renewed by Dana Gioia Los Angeles is an impossible city to describe, even for natives. Make any assertion about the place, and the opposite will of…
Two Poems for My Father

April 27, 2021 Ming Di
On the Yangtze River, through the Wu Gorge / Photo by Perfect Zero / Flickr Summer Elegy for my father From June to June, as though uninterrupted, I…
See How She Creates Light: On Translating Liu Xia

January 2018
Ming Di
I was struck by one of the poems Liu Xia released a few days before her husband, Liu Xiaobo, died of cancer as a political prisoner in China. One line in particular hovered in my dreams until one morn…
Two Poems

May 2016
Ming Di
What One Leaf Tells In the wind, questions to heaven bang the white poplar. Answers fracture – a thousand white leaves. A thousand blameless mouths. A thousand. Ten thousand colorless excuses; I pi…