River 瑩瑩 Dandelion
Poetry
Staten Island, NY
River 瑩瑩 Dandelion (he, him, keoi 佢) walks with his ancestors. He is a practitioner of ancestral medicine through writing, teaching, energy healing, and creating ceremony. As a poet, he writes to connect with the unseen and unspoken so we can feel and heal. As an energy healing practitioner, he guides people through transformation. River is the winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. He is the author of remembering (y)our light, a debut chapbook on honoring matriarchs and ancestors across generations.
Thrice-nominated for Best of the Net, River's work is twice-published in Best New Poets. His poetry, essays, and peer-reviewed articles also appear in Apogee Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Bellevue Literary Review, Bellingham Review, The Margins, Mizna, Plentitudes Journal, Split this Rock, The Offing, Asian American Journal of Psychology, and beyond. His work is also anthologized in We the Gathered Heat: AAPI Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word (Haymarket Books, 2024), Transmasculine Poetics (Sundress Publications, 2024), and Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology (Verve Press, 2023).
A Lambda Literary fellow and Kundiman fellow, River facilitates creative writing workshops, where participants connect with their own inner and collective power. He has taught at Rutgers University-Newark, Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, Restorative Justice Initiative, Lambda Literary, Museum of the City of New York, and elsewhere. He has also been awarded residencies and fellowships from Baldwin for the Arts, Bread Loaf, Caldera Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Monson Arts, Tin House, Vermont Studio Center, and beyond.
In 2016-2017, River was awarded the Knafel Fellowship to travel to Chinatowns around the world, where he documented stories of migration and resilience across the diaspora. From his travels, he co-curated Homeward Bound, a multimedia exhibit that uses photographs, poetry, film, and archival work to highlight stories of migration, displacement, cultural organizing, historic preservation, and everyday resilience in global Chinatowns.
River holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University—Newark, where he was a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow. He also served as a Lecturer and taught Poetry of the People, a course that bridged contemporary American poetry and grassroots movement building from the 1960's to present-day. River has performed and presented his work internationally from the Dodge Poetry Festival to the University of Havana. He loves to swim and does this work for queer and trans ancestors and descendants to come.