Jenny Qi spent her early years in Las Vegas, NV and later Nashville, TN. She writes across genres, focusing primarily on poetry and nonfiction. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic and Huffington Post.
Poetry
Her poems are published or forthcoming in ZYZZYVA, Rattle, Figure 1, Bellevue Literary Review, Atticus Review and other journals and anthologies; they have been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net.
Her first poetry collection, written during her Ph.D. training and titled I will be somewhere else yesterday, was a Jake Adam York Prize finalist.
Her writing contains themes of grief and loss, family relationships and the inheritance of trauma, the lived experience of straddling multiple worlds, an exploration of humans as individuals and systems, and the intersection of science and art. Her work is influenced by and responds to both Western and Chinese literature, mythology, and culture, as well as her background as a scientist. She is also working on a series of essays about science, grief, and identity, as well as a second chapbook, tentatively titled Machine Learning, which explores the influence of modern technology, the ways in which society acts as a machine, and how we as its members have internalized its rules.
Science & Science Communication
Jenny Qi received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Science (Cancer Biology) from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 2017, where she studied novel drug candidates in preclinical models of pancreatic cancer.
She has worked as a science and medicine editor at UCSF, American Journal Experts, Doximity and elsewhere, writing and editing scientific manuscripts, grant proposals, news articles, blogs and personal essays. Topics included oncology, health insurance, diversity in medicine, medical humanities, hospice & palliative care, and mental health in academia. Her articles may be found here, and more information can be found on LinkedIn.
She was a co-founder, co-host and producer of the science storytelling podcast Bone Lab Radio.
Jenny has also retained from her scientific training a fondness for data analysis and visualization and telling stories about the world and its populations through that lens.
She currently lives in San Francisco. In her spare time, she enjoys photography, makes clay and felt creatures, draws elaborate charts, and takes care of her plants.
