Vanderbilt Literary Prize Winner Stephanie Niu has released the official book cover for her forthcoming poetry collection, I Would Define The Sun. The collection will be released on February 15, 2025.

Stephanie Niu’s I Would Define the Sun, awarded the 2024 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection of poems that declare the impossibility of defining something as immense as the sun while striving toward that impossible act. In an era of planetary collapse, filled with bushfires, bleached coral, and burnout, Niu explores what love can do even through estrangement, even through being together at the end of the world. Recycling and folding language through duplexes, sestinas, and echoing couplets, this collection moves across great distances to include Christmas Island, Chinese-American immigration, and the precarity and abundance of the sea through formal and lyric poetry. Expansive in scope, Niu refits the world into a size “made for [her] hands, [her] human tongue,” propelling readers into continuous motion as she searches for home.

Niu is the author of the chapbooks Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance, winner the 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize and She Has Dreamt Again of Water, winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Literary Hub, Copper Nickel, Ecotone Magazine and other publications. She holds a bachelor’s degree in symbolic systems and a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University. Niu received a Fulbright scholarship for research on Christmas Island’s labor history, through which she led youth poetry workshops and published the zine Our Island, Our Future. She lives in New York City.

Niu will give a reading of her winning work on April 7 with the Vanderbilt University Press and the Vanderbilt Reading Series. For more information about this event and upcoming events through the Creative Writing Program, the series page can be found here: https://as.vanderbilt.edu/english/reading-series/

For more information about the Literary Prize, the official announcement can be found here: https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2024/07/09/poet-stephanie-niu-awarded-2024-vanderbilt-university-literary-prize/