Jeffrey Thomas Leong

Jeffrey Thomas Leong is a poet and writer, born in Southern California and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. For over two decades, he worked as a public health administrator and attorney for the City of San Francisco. While earning his MFA in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, he began a project to translate anew the Chinese wall poems found at the Angel Island Immigration Station. These translations became the book Wild Geese Sorrow: The Chinese Wall Inscriptions at Angel Island published by Calypso Editions in 2018 and winner of the 2019 Northern California Book Award for Translation in Poetry. His second book Writ, consisting of original poems also about the Angel Island detainee experience, was published by Eastwind Books of Berkeley in March 2019.

His writing has focused on the Asian American experience including adoption, multiracial families, and student activism during the 1960s. His poetry and prose have appeared in many publications including Crab Orchard, Bamboo Ridge, Hyphen, Eleven Eleven and Poetry Flash. He has read widely at bookstores, museums, colleges and universities in San Francisco, Berkeley, New York City, Vermont and Beirut, Lebanon.

In past lives he has been a singer-songwriter, disc jockey, high school teacher, and open mic host. He lives with his wife and daughter in the East Bay. Learn more at www.jeffreythomasleong.com.