Ha Jin was born Xuefei Jin in Liaoning Province, China. He grew up during the Cultural Revolution, served in the army, and earned both his BA and MA at Chinese institutions before arriving in the US on a student visa to pursue a PhD in English at Brandeis University. His dissertation was on Modernist poets such as Pound, Eliot, Auden, and Yeats because, as he told Dave Weich of Powell’s City of Books, “Those four have poems which are related to Chinese texts and poems that reference the culture. My dissertation was aimed at a Chinese job market. I planned to return to China.” Jin and his wife decided to stay in the United States after seeing what happened at Tiananmen Square on television. Before receiving his degree in 1992, Jin had already published his first book of poetry in English, Between Silences (1990). Another book of poetry, Facing Shadows (1996), appeared a few years later. His most recent collection, A Distant Center (2018), explored the artistic process and meditated on philosophies of home. According to Publisher’s Weekly, “the poems, originally composed in Chinese, are often addressed to a ‘you,’ which can take the form of a ‘little rascal’ wren attempting to build a nest above the author’s door or a schoolchild who is unwilling to practice Chinese calligraphy. But most of the time, Jin’s ‘you’ is aimed as much at the self as it is the reader.”

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