Title
Their Divine Fires
Abstract
Novelist Wendy Chen spoke with Eliot Chen about her debut novel, Their Divine Fires. A captivating and intimate debut novel interwoven with folktale and myth, Chen tells the story of the love affairs of three generations of Chinese women across one hundred years of revolutions both political and personal.
Drawing on the lives of her great-grandmother and her great-uncles—both of whom fought on the side of the Communists—as well as her mother’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution, Chen infuses this gorgeous debut with a passion that will transport the reader back to powerful moments in history while bringing us close to the women who persisted despite the forces all around them. Chen discussed how this is a story about what our ancestors will, and won’t, tell us.
This was the second of two events that CEAS co-sponsored with The Wisconsin Book Festival this fall semester. The other event was a panel with debut Asian memoirists.
Biography
Wendy Chen is the author of the novel Their Divine Fires (Algonquin) and the poetry collection Unearthings (Tavern Books). She is the editor of Figure 1, associate editor-in-chief of Tupelo Quarterly, and prose editor of Tupelo Press. Her poetry, translations, and prose have appeared in Freeman’s, A Public Space, Lit Hub and elsewhere. Her poetry translations of Song-dynasty woman writer Li Qingzhao are forthcoming in a collection titled The Magpie at Night from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2025. She earned her MFA in poetry from Syracuse University and her PhD in English from the University of Denver. Currently, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.