Join us for this rare, first-ever US visit from revered Hong Kong poet Yam Gong, whose 50 years of philosophical work has been brought together for the first time in English translation in the highly-anticipated Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong (Zephyr Press, 2025). Of his work Forrest Gander has said: "No recommendation of his poems could be as effective as simply reading one...."

Born in 1949, the poet left school at the age of thirteen and, in 1973, took a job as a maintenance worker at a dockside warehouse. The work gathered in Moving A Stone reflects the next 50 years of his life and work, as Yam Gong labored six days a week while managing to write poetry that (despite his distance from all established literary circles) is now widely celebrated by both experimental and traditionalist poets and critics in Hong Kong’s literary community. Using shifting tonal registers, he refashions borrowed language, including English song lyrics, Cantonese slang, Chinese folk stories, and news reports.

Co-translated by James Shea and Dorothy Tse, Moving a Stone was selected as the featured book for One City One Book Hong Kong, a community reading programme organized by The Education University of Hong Kong. Yam Gong and his co-translators will give an introduction to the contemporary Hong Kong literary scene and share his poems in a bilingual presentation followed by a Q&A with the audience. Special thanks to the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, which has generously sponsored Yam Gong's reading tour in the United. States.


In-Person Attendance: Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Room 330.
Free and open to the public. No RSVP required.

YAM GONG (pen name of Lau Yee-ching) was born in Hong Kong and began writing poetry in the 1970s. He has received the Hong Kong Youth Literature Award and the Workers’ Literature Award, and, in 1998, he received the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature for his first book And So You Look at Festival Lights along the Street. He has been appointed to the juries of several poetry awards in Hong Kong, including the Hong Kong Youth Literature Award, the Workers’ Literature Award, the Qui Ying Poetry Award and the Lee Sing-wah Modern Poetry Award.

DOROTHY TSE is a Hong Kong writer, whose work has received the Hong Kong Book Prize, Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award. Her debut novel Owlish, translated by Natascha Bruce, was a finalist for the 2023 NBCC Barrios Book in Translation Prize and named a Best Book of 2023 by The New Yorker and a Book of the Year 2023 by the Times Literary Supplement.

JAMES SHEA’s third poetry collection Last Day of My Face won the Iowa Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2025. His translations of selected haiku by Sayumi Kamakura, Applause for a Cloud, is forthcoming from Black Ocean in 2025. He has received grants from the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Vermont Arts Council.

Please contact us with any questions about this event. We can be reached by email at poetryrm@fas.harvard.edu or via phone at (617) 495-2454. We encourage persons with disabilities who would like to request accommodations or have questions about physical access to contact Houghton Library at least three days in advance of the reading.