Yilin Wang (she/they) is a writer, a poet, and Chinese-English translator. Her writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, The Ex-Puritan, the Toronto Star, The Tyee, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She is the editor and translator of The Lantern and Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024).

Her translations have also appeared in POETRY, Guernica, Room, Asymptote, Samovar, The Common, LA Review of Books’ “China Channel,” and the anthology The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories (TorDotCom 2022). She has won the Foster Poetry Prize, received an Honorable Mention in the poetry category of Canada’s National Magazine Award, has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, and has been a finalist for an Aurora Award. Yilin has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and is a graduate of the 2021 Clarion West Writers Workshop.

Qiu Jin (1875–1907) was a Chinese writer, poet, essayist, revolutionary, and the founder of the feminist publication China Women’s News .

Defying the gender expectations of her time, she practiced crossdressing, learned sword-fighting and horseback riding, and acquired a traditional scholarly education. Later, she connected with other activists of China’s feminist movement, studied abroad in Japan, and returned home to join a revolution against the oppressive imperial Qing dynasty government and for women’s rights.

When the uprising she took part in failed, she chose to die as a martyr rather than escape, which has led her to become known as a feminist revolutionary icon in China and internationally. In the brief thirty-two years of life before her execution, Qiu Jin wrote over two-hundred poems, which have been compiled into various collections posthumously.