Stephanie Choi

Stephanie Choi’s poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Electric Literature, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, The Lengest Neoi, was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the 2023 Iowa Poetry Prize and published in 2024. The Lengest Neoi embraces and complicates what it means to err—to wander or go astray; a deviation from a code of behavior or truth; a mistake, flaw, or defect. Beginning with the collection’s title, which combines a colloquial Cantonese phrase (Leng Neoi / “Pretty Girl”) and the English suffix for the superlative degree (—est), the poems in the collection wander, deviate, and flow across bodies, geographies, and languages. 

The collection was featured and reviewed by LitHub, Electric Literature, The Adroit Journal, and Verse Curious. Stephanie was featured as one of Poets and Writers Magazine Debut Poets of 2024. 

Stephanie's current book project, Wherever Shore, uses documentary poetic approaches to write into and around various Chinese American histories and voices—including the Chinese men aboard the Titanic, Polly Bemis, and the poet's own grandfather.

Poems from the collection have been published in West Branch, The Missouri Review, and The Cincinnati Review — select poems here:

"Maiden Voyage" and other poems

"Epistolary Echo"

"Dear Polly,"

Her research interests include contemporay poetics, Asian American literature, experimental poetics, and documentary poetics.