Priscilla Lee is a poet whose work spans visionary speculative poetics and grounded personal narrative. She writes from the seams of ritual, myth, dream logic, and ancestral memory, creating poems that do not decorate reality with magic, but rewire its logic. Whether engaging with inheritance, cultural memory, or the imaginary, her poems unsettle, transform, and leave readers altered.
She is the author of Wishbone (Heyday Press, 2000) and Chiu’s House of Lovely Animals. Wishbone, her debut collection, was selected for the Academy of American Poets Poetry Book Club and received national promotion through Poets & Writers, Small Press Distribution, and the California Arts Council. Praised by poets including Carolyn Forché and Yusef Komunyakaa, the book explores family, culture, and identity through the lens of a second-generation Chinese American woman growing up between two worlds. Her second collection, Chiu’s House of Lovely Animals: Confessional Poetry Written by a Ridiculously Funny Asian American Manic Depressive, demonstrates her wit and playfulness while extending her exploration of memory, inheritance, and myth.
Her speculative poems, including Shaman, Blue Octopus at Four, Sight, Peel, and The Web of the Dream Catcher, are not metaphorical or genre-adjacent; they create fully imagined alternate worlds shaped by ritual, emotional clarity, and mythic logic. In doing so, Lee contributes to a distinctive "speculative poetics" that enriches Asian American literature with visionary and metaphysical dimensions.
Lee’s poetry has earned numerous honors, including a Poetry Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies, the Emily Chamberlain Cook Poetry Prize from UC Berkeley, the Greg Grummer Poetry Award from Phoebe, and the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Literary Award. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, the Poetry Foundation website, and in landmark anthologies such as Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women, Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves: A Contemporary Anthology of Asian American Women's Poetry, Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed and Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems. Her public readings include the Hugh C. Hyde Living Writers Series / Laurie Okuma Memorial Reading at San Diego State University.
Lee began her poetry studies at UC Berkeley Extension with Richard Silberg and Tom Clark. At UC Berkeley, she studied with Ishmael Reed, Thom Gunn, August Kleinzahler, Gary Soto, and Sandra Cisneros. She continued to develop her voice in private workshops led by Leslie Kirk Campbell, Kim Addonizio, Julie Bruck, and Diane di Prima. Briefly enrolled in the MFA program at San Francisco State University, she studied with Frances Mayes before returning to full-time work as a technical writer to support herself.
Since 1989, Lee has also worked as a technical writer in Silicon Valley. This experience, rooted in the quiet, often invisible labor of navigating complex systems, has profoundly shaped her discipline and voice. Unlike poets who invoke technology as metaphor, Lee’s relationship to tech is lived, not aestheticized; her poems emerge from that terrain while holding space for rupture, mystery, and myth. She lives in San Francisco.
Priscilla Lee’s debut collection Wishbone has garnered wide critical acclaim, drawing praise from esteemed poets and journals alike for its bold imagery, cultural resonance, and lyrical power:
- Carolyn Forché: "Through Priscilla Lee's Wishbone, we enter a world both magical and harrowing, where the barracudas are melancholy and porcupines are kept as pets, a world in which a firing squad and America are a telegram apart. Seldom are we blessed with a first book as poignant and absorbing as this one is, as street-pure, as wise."
- Yusef Komunyakaa: "Priscilla Lee's wonderful Wishbone draws together cultures and varied experiences to form a mature wisdom. A sensuous intelligence of body and mind helps to unite the sacred and profane, and a tension is created in these poems that surprises and pleases. This young poet's words dance within her well controlled, provocative images—a distilled passion that takes little for granted in this imaginative, observed arena of chance and honed design. Wishbone is bold and tender, shaped out of classical mythologies and everyday life into an earned beauty we can trust."
- Kim Addonizio: "In Wishbone, Priscilla Lee mixes Kuan Yin and Christmas lights, shark fin dumplings and shots of tequila, the sound of mah jong tiles and slashing punk-rock guitar riffs.... Lee patrols the borders of experience with a keen eye and ear for the stories of those who, like Lee herself, perpetually cross back and forth between past and present, fortune and accident, dreams and waking life. It's our good luck that from her relentless attention she has fashioned these rich, involving poems."
- Virginia Quarterly Review: Her name, the poet tells us, means ancient wisdom, which she delivers with refreshing poise and maturity in Wishbone, her first volume of poetry. A second generation Chinese American, Lee questions the limitations of writing only the "cross cultural experience." Nonetheless, she is proud of her heritage and her work reflects a blend of cultures and beliefs. Lee explores a spiritual world shaped by myth and magic and memory. Playful and sensuous, sardonic and bittersweet, her poems are a journey of self-discovery-reflections on sexuality, family, ethnicity. "I love the act of giving shape to desire, the inexplicable light that lets us look into the secrets of others," she says. Sometimes profane, sometimes profound, these poems provoke and enchant, always inhabited by a sense of Lee's revealing presence.
- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review: "[B]racing energy and unsentimentality make Wishbone... a rewarding ride. The book is worth buying just for "Peel," a riff on her Chinese and American names." It's a memoir of a girl trying to hold on to the part of herself that comes from her grandparents' Chinese culture while living out her desires and ambitions, healthy and not-so, as a young independent woman in San Francisco. The tension is palpable and exciting. For example, in "Offering," the poet wants to give her lover, "the rock and roll star in black high-tops" a statue of Kuan Yin. Her grandmother retorts, "Kuan Yin is not given as a gesture, even her name is holier/ than the ocean's thunder. Why do you give him this blessing? His nose/ is like a knife. He will have a short life, eating wind and/ coughing up bitterness."
In "Chinese Girl in the Mirror" she mocks her English teacher's praise of her "distinctly/ Asian voice" and tells off a friend who "asked me/ whether my family would consider/ going back to China/ if the Communists/ were overthrown . . . my [great-great-]grandfather came/ to build the railroads/ and what did his family ever do/ to make him feel/ more American than me."
