Grace H. Zhou is a poet and cultural anthropologist. She is the author of the chapbook, Soil Called a Country, which was selected for Newfound's 2023 Emerging Poets Series. Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, Narrative Magazine, Frontier Poetry, Longleaf Review, The Margins, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and she was a finalist for Black Warrior Review's 2022 poetry contest. She received her PhD from Stanford University and is currently a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow. She serves as a poetry editor for Otherwise Magazine and reader for Tinderbox Poetry.

Other poems on the web by Grace H. Zhou:
"New Cold War"
"The Magical Dark"
"Home Is a Verb of Motion"
"Somewhere, East Turkestan"
"Surge"
"The Burial of a Woman Known as China Mary"
"Excuse Me"
"The Things You See"
"The Canyon Is Not a Metaphor"

Grace H. Zhou's Website.

Grace H. Zhou on Twitter.

About Soil Called a Country:

"Here is a poet skilled and perceptive in language as a forager, invoking what is timeless, ancient, and immediate: the life cycles of plants and the preservation of knowledge and care between generations and relations. Through a wide display (and reclamation) of poetic forms, violent histories, and the losses marked by racially-targeted erasure and fracture, Zhou provides remedy. Where there is starvation, there is satiation. Where there is archived language defining immigrants solely for their labor and utility, there is gesture to holistic remembrance, 'un-bending their backs.' This is the travel narrative—or rather, a rumination that crosses geographies and time—I've been waiting for. Zhou writes complexly, majestically, of land and its descendants."
—Claire Hong

"These formally varied poems traverse diverse landscapes, cross continents and oceans that are haunted by history's forgotten ghosts. 'We folded the past like a secret / inheritance,' Zhou writes in the opening poem, before reanimating this hidden past. Soil Called a Country is a stirring excavation of loss and desire, inherited traumas and dreams. It is also a reclamation of home and humanity for some of the unnamed, voiceless spirits that litter our history—the Chinese immigrants who struggled to make a life in a harsh new land, including countless women nicknamed China Mary and the victims of the LA Chinatown massacre of 1871. An anthropologist as well as a poet, Zhou understands better than most the importance of this unearthing. In the closing poem, she writes, 'To reimagine is to remember. / To feed is to keep alive.' Soil Called a Country remembers those whom the dominant culture would forget and, in doing so, keeps their dreams alive."
—Jenny Qi