Anelise Chen

Anelise Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press), a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. The experimental novel is a meditation on winning and losing, the perils of perfectionism, and why to keep going when giving up seems preferable. In 2019, she received a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 nomination.

Anelise Chen’s next book, CLAM DOWN, is a hybrid memoir forthcoming from One World in 2025. Based on her brief stint as the Paris Review’s “Mollusk Correspondent,” the book looks at metaphors of shell-building and what humans can learn from mollusks about shutting down or opening up in times of crisis and grief. After her divorce, Chen is compelled to examine her own clam-like nature and her “clam-lineage,” including her father who left the family for a decade to write a mysterious software called Shell Computing.

Chen’s fiction and essays have appeared recently in The Believer, Conjunctions, The Atlantic, and McSweeney’s. Past publication credits include New York Times, NPR, BOMB, New Republic, and The Village Voice. Chen’s next project is about paying attention to nature in urban and suburban spaces, by thinking deeply with street trees, parking lot weeds, invasive species, migrating birds, and buried water ways. Currently, she is involved with various grants through Columbia World Projects, the Climate School, and the Center of Social Difference to further plant literacy in high school students and to develop new, interdisciplinary techniques to bridge scientific and artistic practices.

Chen was born in Taipei, and moved to Los Angeles in 1990. She earned her BA from U.C. Berkeley and her MFA from New York University. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Blue Mountain Center, Banff Centre, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. She lives in New Haven with her family.