In our presentation, we will discuss the process of curating, translating, and editing our anthology, Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons: New Chinese Writing (Honford Star, 2025), which includes sixteen authors in their English-language debut, and spans across fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Throughout the process of author selection, we kept an enduring eye on voices that held to experimentation, beauty, and strangeness, moving against the typicality of social realism, reductive orientalism, or ideological narratives. Instead of the anthropological tendencies of many anthologies to ‘explain’ a nation or a culture, we wanted to simply exhibit the stylistic diversity and ever-shifting nuances of the Chinese language itself, and the vastness of material by which contemporary writers work from: the historical, the fantastic, the daily, the mystic. This intention was met in turn by an intensive translation process, in which eighteen different translators lent their skills and intelligence to the complex, multivalent texts before them, and each translation was carefully edited to match the alive, singular nature of their originals in their independently alive, singular fashion. In commenting on our editorial choices, our journey from conception to publication, and our own inevitable biases as anthologists, we will give an overarching showcase of how this compilation came together, our approach to translation, and what we hope the English language will gain from this introduction.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet, writer, editor, and translator. Born in China and living on Vancouver Island. The collection, then telling be the antidote, won the Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize and was published in 2024. The chapbook, How Often I Have Chosen Love, won the Frontier Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published in 2019. She is one of the editors and translators of Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons: New Chinese Writing, an anthology published in 2025. She has received the New Millennium Award for Poetry and the Juxtaprose Poetry Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, the Artlyst Art to Poetry Award, and the Ambit Poetry Competition. Poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Prairie Schooner, and more. Prose works have appeared in Granta, 3:AM Magazine, Cleveland Review of Books, The Shanghai Literary Review, and more. Poem-films have shown in festivals in London, Vienna, New York City, and Athens. She runs the Beijing-based, bilingual literary journal Spittoon Literary Magazine. Her website is shellyshan.com.
Zuo Fei (昨非), a Beijing-based university English teacher, writer, and translator, runs a WeChat poetry blog introducing foreign poetry to Chinese readers. She serves as the Chinese-language editor-in-chief of Spittoon Literary Magazine, which showcases contemporary Chinese literature to English readers. She is also an editor of Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons, an anthology of new Chinese writing. Her recent works include the short story “Notes in the Consulting Room” (Paper Republic), the critical essay “Metaphor, the Paradox in Our Times” (Shanghai Culture), and the poem “The Poet’s Lover,” first-place winner of the 2024 International Proverse Poetry Prize. She is the author of The Reed Cutter (Guangxi Normal University Press) and is completing a forthcoming study on poetry titled The Genealogy of Metaphysical Poetry.
