Overview
Julia Chen
Overview
Julia Chen
“
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
”
Mary Oliver, "Starlings in Winter"
Where the heart is
Los Angeles born-and-raised
Boston-educated
A few fledgling NYC years
Sojourn to the North Sea (Scotland)
page turners
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
On loop
Hozier’s Unreal Unearth
Julia Chen is a Chinese American writer, editor, and strategic storyteller. She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of St. Andrews (graduating November 2023) and holds a BA in English Literature from Boston University. Her professional experience to date has been in Off-Broadway theater (with a focus on marketing and development) and municipal government. In her off-hours, she’s still aspiring to the Miyazaki heroine she knows she can be, which might explain why her first ever published piece was about (literal) toast.
Julia has received support for her work from Kundiman and Winter Tangerine. Her writing can be found in No Tender Fences: An Anthology of Immigrant & First-Generation American Poetry and Honey Literary. She is also an Assistant Fiction Editor at The Offing.
Experience
Experience
Where I've been & where we go from here...
So you’ve made it past the official bio! At the heart of it all, I'm a storyteller—let me help you tell yours. I thrive at the crossroads of creativity and community and being around similarly curious and caring individuals is where I do my best work. Honing one’s craft and building a meaningful space in the world takes time. I know firsthand the meandering involved as you make your way.
I'm an experienced arts administrator with a focus on individual donor stewardship, design/communications, and event planning in the nonprofit theater world. I've also helped project manage and cultivate the talent pipeline—as well as lead communications—for a data science team in municipal government. I believe in the value of stories, in elevating all the voices that have worked to tell them, and in respecting the audience those stories are for.
Food, travel, and theater are where my words especially thrive. That's what I’m composed of: 38% water and 20.67% a dusting of matcha, passport stamps, and Playbills.