Zhang Er

Zhang Er's work has been published online and in print in China, Taiwan, and the United States. In reference to her 2004 Verses on Bird, Chinese-American poet Bei Dao wrote that "Zhang Er's poems lead us to another world, where we take a bird's-eye view of our world; dive into the blank of writing and shriek in despair. The eloquence in her poems is a voice debating our time." In an article published in Comparative Literature: East and West in 2009, the Chinese poet, translator, scholar and editor Zhang Ziqing described Zhang Er as "a brilliant bilingual translator [who] made a great success [sic] in introducing American and Chinese poetries into each other's country," and added that "her translations of American poets would appear in Poetry in Beijing, a poetry journal similar to Poetry in Chicago. Her poems in Chinese often came out in New World Poetry Bimonthly in Los Angeles, an influential poetry journal distributed in the Chinese speaking areas of the world." Yellow Rabbits Reviews called the poems in her most recent collection of poetry in English, First Mountain, "intensely immediate...collected pauses and spirited moments of grace." Starting in the 2010s, Zhang Er began to write opera librettos. Moon in the Mirror, for which she cowrote the libretto in collaboration with Martine Bellen, has been performed in Flushing, Queens, and at Cleveland State University. Her opera Cai Yan premiered at Pacific Lutheran University in 2016.

Zhang Er (Chinese: 张耳, born 1960) is the pen name of Chinese and American poet, translator, and opera librettist Mingxia Li (李明霞). Born in Beijing, China, where she trained as a physician, she has lived in the United States since 1986. She earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Pharmacology in 1992 from the Graduate School of Medical Sciences of Cornell University (now the Weill Cornell Graduate School), while simultaneously immersing herself in the New York poetry scene, where she wrote poetry, hosted bilingual readings, and edited literary journals. She now teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and continues to write poetry.