Author Bio
Teow Lim Goh is the author of two poetry collections, Islanders (2016) and Faraway Places (2021), and an essay collection Western Journeys (2022). Her essays, poetry, and criticism have been featured in The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, and The New Yorker.
At Length
I write from the nexus of people and place.
One of my projects is to recover the stories of Chinese immigrants in the American West.
In my first book Islanders (2016), I write into the history of Chinese exclusion and detention at the Angel Island Immigration Station between 1910 and 1940.
The New Yorker writes of this work, “Teow Lim Goh imagines English-language versions of the poems that Chinese women detainees might have composed… Throughout the slim volume, Goh presents wounds that strip searches, medical exams, and extended interrogations did not reveal.”
Bitter Creek is an epic poem on the massacre of Chinese miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885.
China Mary is a book-length narrative of linked poems based on the life of a Chinese prostitute who lived in Evanston, Wyoming. I found her story when I was researching the Rock Springs Massacre.
I also write essays on art, nature, politics, and environmental issues.
Western Journeys (2022) is an essay collection on my adventures in the American West, immigration to America, and dialogues with books and art. I consider how we access truth in the face of erasure and ask what it means for an immigrant to be at home.
Faraway Places (2021) is a chapbook of poems on nature, art, and the body. It is a shadow text to my writing on travel, witness, and identity.
Based in Denver for the past decade, I enjoy hiking and skiing in the mountains. Sometimes I write about these adventures.
Before I thought of myself as a writer, I was a math major in college. My Erdös number is 3. I am seeking opportunities to earn a finite Bacon number.
Teow Lim Goh 