Joyce Chen is a writer, editor, and community builder who draws inspiration from many coastal cities. She is the current Hugo House writer-in-residence, and was a 2019-2020 Hugo House Fellow. She has covered entertainment and human interest stories for Rolling Stone, Elle, the New York Daily News, Refinery29, Paste magazine, Entertainment Tonight, Today.com, and People, among others, and her creative writing credits include LitHub, Poets & Writers, Narratively, Slant’d, and Barrelhouse, among others. Her topic-specific writings have appeared in publications as wide-ranging as Architectural Digest, The Knot, and Broccoli magazine. She occasionally writes book reviews for Hyphen and Orion magazines, and is the co-editor of Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times, a collection of poetry paired with essays, forthcoming from Red Hen Press. 

Joyce has received generous support for her work through Hugo House, VONA, Tin House, Vermont Studio Center, Artist Trust, Centrum, and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and she has studied with literary greats like Kiese Laymon, E.J. Koh, Zia Jaffrey, Shelley Jackson, and Greil Marcus.

She is the executive director of The Seventh Wave, an arts and literary nonprofit that champions art in the space of social issues. TSW comprises an annual literary magazine that was a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Awards in 2021 for Best Magazine; a Community Anthologies program that gives TSW’s editorial keys to folks to curate their own topic-specific folios; and in-person and digital residency programs that offer facilitated opportunities for creatives to converse and collide.

Currently, Joyce is working on a memoir-in-essays that examines the friction that arises from living between two sets of values that are often at odds with one another — the American ideals of independence and self-fulfillment and the Taiwanese values of family, community, and sacrifice — as experienced through different modes of time perception.