Deep Breaths by Mi Jialu is a Chinese–English bilingual collection of poems written during his past thirty-seven years (1981-2018) and was published by Showwe Press in Taiwan (430pp).  This volume is divided into three parts in reverse chronological order. First part titled “Verses from the Sky’s Edge” includes the poems he wrote between the years of 1996 and 2018 when he crossed the Pacific Ocean to study for his doctoral degree at the University of California at Davis and then began working at The College of New Jersey. Second part titled “Cloud Divination at Mount Gele” includes the poems he wrote between the years of 1985-1995 when he finished college and started to teach, then went to Beijing University to study for his MA degree in Comparative Literature, and then moved to study at CUHK. Third part titled “Flashes of Youth” includes the poems he wrote during his undergraduate studies at SISU between 1981 and 1984. 

This reading will be accompanied by shakuhachi master performer Glenn Shoyuu Swann.

Mi Jialu (original name Jiayan Mi) is the author of Self-Fashioning and Reflexive Modernity in Modern Chinese Poetry, 1919-1949(2004) and Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge(2009, co-edited with Sheldon Lu) and the editor of  Poetry Across Oceans: An Anthology of Chinese American Diaspora Poetry(2014); The Dao and the Routes: Mirage and Transfiguration in East-West Poetics(2017) and The Dao and the Routes: Enchantment and Spectrality in East-West Poetics(2017). He is completing a book project in English titled “Heteroscape: Topography and Poetics of Navigation in Modern Chinese literature, Art and Film” to be published by Brill. 

A graduate of Beijing University (MA), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Ph. D) and the University of California at Davis (Ph. D), he is Associate Professor in the departments of English and World Languages & Cultures at The College of New Jersey. He is the Director of the Chinese Program at the college. He lives in Princeton with his family.