JinJin Xu: Groundbreaking Poet, Artist, and Amherst Alum

Returning to Amherst to read at LitFest 2025, JinJin Xu ’17 decided to pay her old freshman dorm a visit. A self-described inter-disciplinary artist, “haunting the oceans between New York / Shanghai / Macau,” the Shanghai-born poet went on to travel the world as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, teach creative writing at New York University, and exhibit her multimedia work internationally after graduating from Amherst. Xu also spent her first year of college on the second floor of Charles Pratt in, as it so happens, my current dorm room. During her campus visit this spring, I sat down with Xu to learn more about her life, journey to Amherst, and groundbreaking creative work.

Since college, Xu’s artwork — from language-bending poetry to large-scale installations and film exhibits — has been united by the common endeavor to bear witness to marginalized stories, artifacts, and memories.

Xu has been telling stories since before she could read. For example, Xu took pleasure in listening to recordings of the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” — a 14th-century Chinese epic — and then reciting it to unsuspecting taxi drivers during long cab rides. However, it was not until the third grade, when she enrolled in an English-speaking international school, that Xu developed a “sound-based relationship to language” which has informed her poetry ever since. Speaking no English when she enrolled, Xu turned to audiobooks once more; this time, “The Magic Treehouse.”

“I really listened to the sounds … When you can taste the words and feel the words as physical, strange objects in your mouth, that foreignness to language was really the origin of my relationship to poetry,” Xu said.

When Xu matriculated to Amherst, studying English and art history, her formative experiences with the spoken word led her to question the incongruities between oral speech and printed text.

“When I wrote poetry I felt contained by the squareness of the page or the boundaries of the page,” she reflected. “[Poetry] always felt more alive than that, and more physical … I didn’t understand why I had to break lines in certain ways or contain it to this amount of page.”

While working on her senior thesis, a work of creative nonfiction titled “Mami’s Tail,” Xu began “playing with the space between languages” in a way that enabled her to analyze both the oral and written word through the lens of bilingualism. This was, perhaps, the beginning of Xu’s “docu-poetics.”

Studying under Professor of English in Film and Media Studies Pooja Rangan and Assistant Professor of English in Film and Media Studies Joshua Guilford, Xu recalled “watching a lot of experimental film” and interrogating the difference “between who is behind the camera and in front of the camera.” This split encouraged Xu’s thinking about the page as a kind of “in-betweenness.”

In this regard, the experimental work of Vietnamese filmmaker and theorist Trinh Minh-ha, whose “subtitles linger” after a cut to black, was of particular influence for Xu. “What you expect to hear and what you expect to see is different. That's when I started understanding line breaks [as a way of] making-strangeness of a line,” Xu said. “I got a totally different relationship to the page when I started thinking about it as a moving image,” she said.

How do these documentary methodologies of strangeness and estrangement unfold? A cursory flip-through of Xu’s debut chapbook, “There is Still Singing in the Afterlife,” suffices to show that she interrogates language in a distinct way. Poems in this collection sprawl irregularly across the page, lines of text turn perpendicular, and typesetting itself becomes semantic. An untitled collage-like poem on the second page (excerpted from Xu’s senior thesis) exemplifies these features: Cropped lines of typography jostle for space inside overlapping rectangular apertures on a black background, itself populated with white-fonted phrases in English and traditional Chinese. Xu’s cinematic treatment of unpunctuated text in this collection enlivens language with the intimacy of direct speech: “[you whisper a / mother s prayer].” The poem is ambitiously audio-visual in its direct treatment of spokenness, relying upon intervals between words and missing letters throughout to notate the breath and attention in lieu of formal punctuation.

After graduating from Amherst, Xu spent her Watson Fellowship recording the voices of displaced women in refugee camps around the world. Afterwards, not wanting to “flatten their voices on the page” or “aestheticize it as poetry,” Xu held on to those voices for more than seven years. “I didn’t know what to do with them,” she explained, “because I felt like I owed them some kind of responsibility.”

Xu ended up using her recordings in a sound installation through which visitors could walk. “You follow your ear, [whether] you speak the language or not. I wanted the directness of the voice to encounter you.” Xu’s work spans a wide range of media — from film and sound installations to poetry to prose. Breaking open the page the way her installations augment audiovisual space, Xu reaches out to her viewer, at times critically, though always with compassion. By addressing the audience directly, Xu hopes to create a trust between the artist and the exhibit’s visitors.

As Xu describes it, her creative process can’t be broken down into discrete media. “Everything I make is driven by a kind of poetics, and I think the process is actually quite similar for everything I make, no matter what medium it ends up being … because it always originates with some kind of impulse that I really need to make something,” she said.

Like her sound installation, Xu’s docu-poetry is interested in the speech of individuals in marginal or unnarrated spaces. As such, Xu’s work constantly calls attention to missing language, foreign speech, and rifts in time. Xu’s artistic interest in narrating repression and disenfranchisement is closely linked to her personal experiences as a writer facing government censorship.

Working as a magazine editor in China, Xu became the intermediary between commission- writers and government censors. “I had to learn the red line of exactly where to step … I’d propose these subjects, but then the censor would be like, ‘No, you can’t publish that or write about that.’”

Xu’s “To Red Dust,” a poem-cycle in “There is Still Singing in the Afterlife,” features a series of biographical vignettes with a prominent peculiarity: The “Place, Date” header of each poem is partially redacted, with a bracketed blank space where “Shanghai” or “2018” ought to be. When asked about this feature of her work, the poet was surprisingly candid. “My work has always been — with the vertical text, redactions, and empty brackets — in reference to censorship: the state censorship I’ve faced myself but also acts of self-censorship in order to protect myself and protect my friends.”

For all its elliptical language, Xu’s poetry is deeply personal. “There are things that I can only speak about in abstractions or in erased forms,” she told me. “The friends I refer to are journalists who have been imprisoned for [their] writing.”

Reflecting on her undergraduate experience at Amherst, Xu recalled a feeling of wordless wonder. “Those moments [I’d] walk out of class and look at the snow on the ground, and just feel like, ‘Whoa. The world is new and its worth living in.’ I think that’s the most important and beautiful feeling. Nearly a decade later, this feeling is what she recalled most from her time at Amherst: “I don’t remember that much from any specific class, but I do remember the feeling I got, which [was], ‘I want to continue reading and living.’ It changed how I saw the world.”

In the eight years since Xu received her diploma, she hasn’t stopped reading and living. “I’ve been trying to build towards a life as a writer and as an artist … This year was really the year I [felt] like I've gotten my footing … It came with so many trials and tribulations: I worked so many different odd jobs, real jobs … it takes commitment and a kind of long, sustained, blind faith to make it happen.”

As the Moving Image Diversity Fellow at Bard College, Xu continues to apply her docu-poetics to stories of erasure. When we spoke, Xu told me that she was working on an interdisciplinary, mixed-media memorial to the Nanking Massacre and Iris Chang.

The same impulse toward collage’s materiality that guided Xu’s Amherst senior thesis continues to drive her docu-poetics: “I can’t [shoot film] in the past, but I do have archives, which I then collage together as a physical installation,” Xu explained.

“I want people to touch and experience and engage as a collective way of memorializing and not forgetting and not forgiving,” Xu said. “When I talk about … this amnesia, forced by the Japanese government [upon] this certain massacre, I don’t want to relegate it as a ‘historical’ event. I want this act of forced forgetting to be alive.”