Paddy Qiu

Artist Statement

Paddy Qiu is a poet and public health researcher whose work explores the tensions between intimacy, identity, and inherited systems. Growing up queer and Chinese American in rural Kansas, their poetry traces generational memory, diaspora, and the friction between Western orthodoxy and collective insurgency. They are the author of A.I. Fever, a micro-chapbook published in Ghost City Press’s 2024 Summer Series. Their writing has appeared in Modern Language Studies, 45th Parallel, Beaver Magazine, FOLIO, Barzakh Magazine, Zoetic Press, among others. They’ve performed at Artspace, NCAAT, and Poetic Underground in Kansas City. Qiu is the winner of The William Herbert Memorial Poetry Contest and recipient of The John F. Eberhardt Excellence in Writing Award, The C.L. Clark Writing Award for BIPOC Writers, and The Henry Matthew Weidner Essay Award. For them, poetry and research remain parallel vessels for amplifying resilience, equity, and community across time and place.