Steph Chang 張雅雯 (she/they) is a writer, editor, and contemporary art historian based in New York City and rural Ohio. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Sixth Finch, Kenyon Review, Adroit Journal, Strange Horizons, Waxwing, Hobart Pulp, Chestnut Review, Peach Mag, and The Offing, among others. She has been recognized by the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of the United Kingdom, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, League of Canadian Poets, Hollins University, Asian American Writers Workshop, and more.

Her poem, “Lotus Flower Kingdom,” won the 2021 Adroit Prize for Poetry, judged by Carl Phillips. It was selected for inclusion in the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology, awarded a Special Mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has been taught at both the high school and collegiate levels, including San Jose State University. Additionally, Steph is the author of Night Market in Technicolor (Ghost City Press 2020), SAINTLESS (Sunset Press 2022), and a contributor to WHERE ELSE: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology (Verve Poetry Press 2023). 

She presented her senior thesis—”Post-Sexual Natures: Queer Ecological Erotics and Intimacies in Ren Hang’s ‘Athens Love’ Photographs, 2015”—at Johns Hopkins University’s Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium and the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention, along with publishing chapters in The Journal of Art Criticism and Asterisk* Journal of Art & Art History. Additionally, she published an article on Jennie Jieun Lee’s ‘Queen Bee’ in Verdigris: The Smith College Journal of Art & Art History and is set to present on Wang Qingsong’s monumental staged photographs at the SUNY New Paltz Undergraduate Art History Symposium. Her research interests include modern/contemporary Chinese photography, Asian American ecopoetics, queer ecology, landscape, and ecocriticism. 

Her work spans art museums (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met Cloisters, The Gund) and strategic communications for leading arts and culture organizations (Art Basel, BMW Group Culture, Korea International Art Fair, UBS Art Collection, Storm King Art Center, Gwangju Biennale, Art Collaboration Tokyo, Miffy USA, Ballet Hispánico). Currently, she is curating a solo show on Milton Rogovin’s photographs of Appalachian coal miners and an exhibition of Dr. Yan Zhou’s film photographs taken of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

A first-generation college student, she studies Art History and English at Kenyon College, where she received the $60,000 S. Georgia Nugent Award in Creative Writing, Academy of American Poetry Prize, John Crowe Ransom Poetry Prize, and Muriel C. Bradbrook Prize. She is the Visual Art Intern at The Kenyon Review and Editor-in-Chief of Sunset Press, a publisher of chapbooks.

Steph was born by the Pacific Ocean—where she hopes to return to someday.