But Octopi Don’t Sing, a chapbook by Li Zhuang '19, has been published by Purple Ink Press. The work, which is Zhuang’s debut poetry chapbook, was selected as the runner up in Purple Ink Press’s Chapbook Contest.
Chen Chen, the author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, selected the work as the runner up. He praised the chapbook saying, “Queering form, Buddhism, the moon, and MBTI tests, Li Zhuang’s poems are gorgeous maximalist monsters. They are many-armed, weirdly charming, utterly disarming. In this latest landscape of repression and societal collapse, this deceptively small collection will lift you from complacency and despair, will teach you to ‘let the most vulnerable/ part of your body decide.’ After all, what is a monster but that which dares to survive—and to take booming pleasure in it?”
The work is described by the publisher as being, “both playful and piercing. It is a chapbook that moves its many arms through the tangled waters of time, language, and desire.” But Octopi Don’t Sing “bridges the chasm between cultures, navigating the cartography of womanhood, queerness, and migration.”
Zhuang is a PhD candidate of Creative Writing at Florida State University and lives in Tallahassee, Florida. She graduated with an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Pleiades, The Common, Denver Quarterly, The Madison Review, and The Collapsar, etc. Li is a finalist for the 2025 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize (judged by Brandon Som) and a runner-up for Grist’s ProForma contest (judged by Beth Ann Fennelly). Li is also the winner of the 2025 SAMLA Graduate Student Creative Writing Award.
