Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)

@travisclau.bsky.social

5757 Followers 6314 Following

(he/him/his) Associate Professor, Crip Queer Poet: c18/c19 British Literature and Culture / Disability Studies / Health Humanities / History of Medicine (immunity and vaccination) travisclau.com

Collage of the 31 book covers on Split This Rock's 2026 Sealey Challenge Reading List. The full list is available at Split This Rock's Bookshop online storefront: https://bookshop.org/lists/2026-sealey-challenge-reading-list
The text of my pantoum: When did we learn that hitting things made them more tender? When did we learn that hitting things made them more tender? Rather than a caress, we prefer the mallet that softens the chew. We make them more tender for the crassness of a need: the mallet that softens the chew breaks apart humble flesh, for the crassness of a need takes no care in breaking apart humble from flesh— limp now with submission. Taking no care, we together limp now with submission toward each other: we together praise the blows that ache us toward each other, back into new hardness. Praise the blows that ache us: this is how we put our backs into new hardness when we could have remained soft.
A prose poem with the following text: Your Birthday Every time you have an appointment or procedure (including every chemo infusion and radiation treatment) you have to tell someone your birth date. Sometimes in one day you will have to recite your birthday many times. Tell the assistant. Tell the nurse. Tell another nurse. Tell everyone your birth date. When you get radiation you have to say it every day. It became so automatic. This month. This day. This year. Again and again. Cancer patients are identified by their dates of birth, and sometimes it feels ironic to think of birth when we are struggling to fight off death.
An open box of three stacks of my book, What's Left Is Tender
A screenshot of my faculty page with the following text: Kenyon Travis Chi Wing Lau Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing English and Creative Writing
My bathroom ceiling with major water staining and damage.
Me crowned by the rainbow palette of the System of Colours print. I am wearing a "friend of Garak" shirt featuring an image of him crowned by a rainbow.
A mural showing a cross-section of the interior of the Kowloon Walled City's many cramped quarters
A closeup of my upper thoracic spinal x-ray.
Me in a feather mask in front of the Columbus ballet photograph studio
A bottle of Bollinger champagne with two glasses filled.
A dark wooden desk featuring the following books of poetry together: Diane Callahan and David Dixon's The Ship and the Storm Darren Demaree's Now Flourish Northern Cardinal Zoe Brigley's lycanthrope Danny Caine's Jewish American Dream Travis Chi Wing Lau's What's Left Is Tender Emily Patterson's Birth of Undoing Adrianna Kimbrough's Woman in Pieces
A screenshot of my paper's abstract with the following text: Historicizing Vaccine Injury in Tension with Disability Justice In this paper, I grapple with one of the thorniest elements of my book project on the literary and cultural history of immunity and vaccination: the history of vaccine injury and the coalition building around its protest. Almost immediately after Edward Jenner popularizes vaccination in the late eighteenth century, medical practitioners, lay healers, and concerned citizens published numerous accounts of vaccine injury, many of which fueled deep anxieties about vaccination's efficacy and medicine's potential harms. This kind of organizing would lead to some of the largest anti-vaccination advocacy groups like the later nineteenth-century National Anti-Vaccination League (NAVL) that specifically responded to compulsory vaccination legislation by claiming vaccines caused widespread disability. On the one hand, these activist coalitions specifically mobilized around shared experiences of debility, disability, and chronic illness (in this case produced by the developing medical establishment that claimed to be invested in staving off these very things). But on the other hand, especially given contemporary disability justice's deep investment in rejecting the long-debunked notion that vaccines cause autism, disability justice would never claim these anti-vaccinators as early disability advocates. How do we tell the history of vaccine injury without reinforcing ableism but also without disavowing the unexpected connections between early anti-vaccinators and disabled people resisting the power of professional medicine and its relationship to the nation?
From left to right: Alison Kafer (seated in a wheelchair and in a black and white patterned shirt), myself (in a dark brown suit and holding a copy of What's Left Is Tender), Bassam Sidiki (in a light blue suit with tie), and Julie Minich (in a black sweater with dark denim jeans) in front of bookcases.
ID: Me on the left wearing a dark red suit with white shirt gesturing mid-sentence beside Georgina Godwin in a dark navy jacket and pants.
Text in red reads: Alice Wong (1974-2025) Celebration of Life. The Asian Art Museum of SF on March 25th, 2026.Red line drawing on marigold background of a Chinese ancestral altar. There are peonies in a vase, a portrait of Alice Wong, incense, and a vase of poppies. Decadent tiers of food are in front of Alice's portrait: peach slices, basket of fries, dumplings, champagne glasses, potato chips, o-toro nigiri, assortment of bao, fruit baskets, dan tat, soondubu jjigae with seafood, chawanmushi, and tangerines. Artwork by Felicia Liang.
A salmon colored flyer with a small circular portrait of me with the cover of What's Left Is Tender beneath. The following text is on the left in a white box: WRITING THROUGH CHANGE WITH TRAVIS LAU Join us on March 26th for an evening of music, poetry, food, and fun with a live performance from Hieroglyph and The Georgetown Phantoms. Poet Travis Chi Wing Lau, author of What's Left Is Tender, joins radio host Georgina Godwin for an intimate conversation about his powerful exploration of disability, chronic pain, queerness, and family silence. THURS 26 MARCH DISABILITY CULTURALCENTER 6:00 PM RSVP: WRITINGTHROUGHCHANGE2026.REGISTER
A pink flyer featuring the following text along headshots and photos of student performers and covers of authors' respective books: 2026 LANNAN LITERARY FESTIVAL WRITING THROUGH CHANGE FEATURING AUTHORS: JULIA ALVAREZ TRAVIS LAU SALMAN RUSHDIE THE GRACENOTES THE HIEROGLYPHS THE PHANTOMS SPECIAL PERFORMANCE BY: THE GLOBAL LAB MARCH 24, 26, 31
A black and white portrait of me without glasses and in a chambray shirt while sitting in front of my bookshelves, which are blurred in the background.
A beige poster with the following text: Crip Tenderness: A Poetry Reading with Travis Chi Wing Lau Dr. Travis Chi Wing Lau holds a B.A. in English/Classics from UCLA and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies at Kenyon College. 5:00 PM March 12, 2026 Carothers Residence Hall Joynes Reading Room Support provided by a grant from The Mellon Foundation, Crip Narratives Collective, and The Humanities Institute It also includes images of each of my book covers and QR codes to rsvp for the event and to learn more about me.
Me in a baby suit and carnation pink shirt at my desk with my bookcases behind me.
The cover of Every Place on the Map Is Disabled: Poems and Essays featuring Adrean Clark's "Perseverance" against a beige background with the text "edited by Camisha L. Jones, Michael Northen, Naomi Ortiz, and Travis Chi Wing Lau"
Me in a tan suit and white shirt sitting beneath my bookshelves.
A peach colored flyer featuring the portraits of Julia Alvarez, myself, and Salman Rushdie with our names beneath them and the following text above: Georgetown University 2026 Lannan Literary Festival Writing Through Change
A screenshot of my poem published in Rogue Agent BESEECH ME NO MORE my crooked child, for your keenest edges arrive implied in reddened eyes, which gaze to trace how mercy never left this world, long pronounced doomed before i ever did. no, though you stared at it all enough to grow so stony, you still curve into living like the currents that first bore you. you grovel for succor and its thousand handmaidens, but really it is pardon you crave as if it were ever mine to give you. cease now your begging for refuge in some other form that brays against the mechanics of your life bent toward an aching good.
Me in a green velvet blazer next to a framed portrait of text in red that reads "how lucky are we?"
A black and white close up of my cat Mercury on his side asleep with his face and paw pressed against my leg
Me in a grey blazer and white shirt seated beneath white bookshelves.
uñviç After Paul Monette they pricked you enough times until there was nothing left to draw but from the remaining vein of obscenity you held in abeyance for so long they kept claiming it was starting to take over the whole of you like a virus like a fucking virus that they cannot even call by a proper name other than one conflated with a set of conditions less opportune than their profitmaking their prescription pad that even the oracles couldn't decipher because we are a brotherhood bound to be kept in the dark and dying in the dark unless we break silence like they break bodies and soon you won't be in the streets with me and I will have to carry your wit as memory as weapon because it was always sharper sharp enough to cut the cosmos and grab gods by the white of their throats damn it I tried to shake the tinnitus of that damn vitals monitor but it is all I can hear aside from the time you told me I was worth more than the pain that you now know better than anyone who comes by with vases full of things that will live longer than you and fail to comfort me when I am left alone with them and this sheet you have imprinted with your sigil for me to carry like a banner into war when I have tried so long to flee from it and the graves that hold so many of the unnamed who died alone so no more of this life of luxury this life of pacifism because they continue to pronounce our death but our right is refusal our right is to survive when we were already supposed to be in the ground
Lumbar x ray of my spine featuring curvature to the right.
Me in a herringbone suit with white shirt sitting at my desk with bookshelves behind me
Me on the couch with my grey tabby Mercury on my lap.
Me in a burgundy suit standing in front of a slide featuring the cover of my book, What's Left Is Tender.
A portrait of me in a grey bird's eye blazer in my office.
My grey tabby Mercury laid on his side on a purple fleece blanket. I am reaching my hand to him.
A black flyer with yellow outlines featuring black and white portraits of Michael and myself with covers of our books and the following text: Dear Vase Already Shattered Against the Fragile Floor & What's Left Is Tender: A Joint Book Launch with Michael Leong and Travis Chi Wing Lau OCTOBER 23, 2025 5:00 PM Community Foundation Theater, Gund Gallery
Stacks of copies of my book, What's Left Is Tender, in a box.
Dorsality For N.W. When I let him touch the small of my back for the first time, I thought a fin would erupt forth— to ground me while I learned to breathe in new waters, this first and sacred time when I was becoming something else entirely too slick, for the flesh I know must stay in motion or risk never moving again.
But first, our Poem of the Week from Travis Chi Wing Lau. POTW: 'Dorsality' by Travis Chi Wing Lau It's been a joy to read (and re-read) Travis debut collection "What's Left is Tender", not just because there's a few connections between the book and fourteen poems - the book features 'In the dead of', an Orville Peck inspired poem first published in Issue 3, and also, 'Apostrophe to Kyphosis', a poem that reworks wording from 'the self is a buried structure', a Christopher Lloyd poem that we published in his pamphlet "Pick Up Your Feelings".
My grey tabby Mercury laying on a living room rug that has blue and white stripes where a sunbeam has cut across. Behind is a coffee table and cat bed.
A wall of bookshelves in a tea brown color.
Me in a grey herringbone suit with white shirt. I am sitting in front of shelves lined with books.
A screenshot of an Instagram story from Prologue Bookshop with a copy of my book open to the title page with my signature / stamp next to my book on the shelf.
Me in my red and blue UPenn regalia with a blue stole that has a rainbow flag printed across it.
From left to right: Myself, Michael Leong, and Mandy Shunnarah each holding our new books.
A stack of over 30 copies of What's Left Is Tender
A cardboard box filled with copies of my new book of poems, What's Left Is Tender
A screenshot of an email with the following text: 2026 Ohio Arts Council Grant Award Artists with Disabilities Access Program - Individuals 2624086 FY 2026 OAC Artists with Disabilities Access Program - Individuals Grant Award Congratulations! The Ohio Arts Council (OAC) board met on July 30 to review all grant panel recommendations for applications submitted for FY 2026 funding, and I am pleased to inform you that your application has been approved!
A translucent white and green flyer that features the cover of my new collection of poems, What's Left Is Tender (which depicts bearded man floating in water beside a lotus) and the following text: WHAT'S LEFT IS TENDER TRAVIS CHI WING LAU BOOK LAUNCH Featuring special guests Michael Leong & Mandy Shunnarah 7PM MONDAY, AUGUST 18 AT PROLOGUE BOOKSHOP
From the endorsements of my forthcoming book of poems, What's Left Is Tender: "At no point does Travis Chi Wing Lau let you forget that the soul resides within a body, regardless of how that body is seen. In What's Left is Tender, Lau asks us to consider what it means to be tender, not as a result of violent hammering but as a result of tenderness begetting tenderness. In poems that refuse to avert their gaze, Lau requests we reconsider the body. "Be prepared for your flesh and your name, like your days, to be numbered," he writes. Be prepared for this collection to take hold of you and not let go." —C. Dale Young, author of The Day Underneath the Day (TriQuarterly Books, 2001), The Second Person (Four Way Books, 2007), Torn (Four Way Books, 2011), The Halo (Four Way Books, 2016), Prometeo (Four Way Books, 2021), and Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems (Four Way Books, 2025)
From the endorsements of my forthcoming book, What's Left Is Tender: "Travis Chi Wing Lau's dexterity of form reminds us that one is both broken by and healed by poetry: it keeps vivid account of what is felt by our massive nervous system as we encounter the pains of living inside our bodies. It also provides a way to cast spells, to invoke powers beyond our limitations and to harness that energy for our renewal and restoration. These poems are architectural wonders, intricate as spider webs and with that same tensile strength that defies any attempt to break its liquid surface. They are seismic eruptions recorded with a sensitive needle, the transcriptions of what shook and moved the ground beneath the poet's feet. You, too, reader, feel the tremorous effect of these tremendous terrestrial events." —D. A. Powell, author of Chronic: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2009), Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2012), Repast: Tea, Lunch, Cocktails (Graywolf Press, 2014)
From the endorsements of What's Left Is Tender, my debut book of poems: Very rarely one opens a debut poetry collections and feels one is reading the author's fifth or sixth book--it is that captivating, and skillful. Travis Chi Wing Lau's What's Left Is Tender is such a book. But why? Because the metaphysics of the body here are given a myriad perspectives, from the author's own story, to travail of the horrorshow known as contemporary American medical system, to the larger question of what it means, after all, to be alive in the body, to the very lovely sensual lyrics teaching us that "compassion is a holding" -- this book is bursting with possibilities of "body and its discontents". Then, there is the question of Lau's treatment of English language, which, to my mind, is disability poetics at its best: formal inventiveness here happens not because the author is showing off their obviously considerable knowledge various formal skills, but because it is viscerally, humanly necessary: there is no other way to say a thing except via innovation. Indeed, reading this book one can see what Mallarme meant when he said that poem is not about an event, it is an event, which is to say: here's a poetics that invents an elegance all its own, "a tendering". Beautiful, necessary work. —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019)
From the blurbs for my poetry collection, What's Left Is Tender: "Travis Chi Wing Lau's What's Left is Tender reveals discoveries like a mosaic. The poles and magnetic fields of internal crippledness are illuminated on the wall. These poems are by turns ironic, bold, and affectionate." —Stephen Kuusisto, author of Planet of the Blind (Dial Press, 1998), Only Bread, Only Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2000), Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening (W. W. Norton, 2006), and Letters to Borges (Copper Canyon Press, 2013)
From the blurbs of my poetry collection, What's Left Is Tender: "Shuttling dynamically between the languages of myth and medicine, drawing on inheritances from family and from literary history, What's Left Is Tender investigates the body's fragility-its bewildering, alluring hardness and softness. The poems themselves make dazzling shapes on the page and in the mind. In Travis Chi Wing Lau's deeply learned and deeply felt poems, "full of / your tender / zeal," we find a craft for living." -Richie Hofmann, author of Second Empire (Alice James, 2015) and A Hundred Lovers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022)
From the advance praise of my collection of poems: "From list to radical erasure, from abecedarian to wailing prayer and "quiet manifestos," this formally restless book challenges a world bent on stamping out bodies deemed error and desires named aberrant, not worth the music that pulses on every page here. No, these poems say, pay attention, "dream of that nectar again." Travis Chi Wing Lau is that rare poet who can combine deep erudition with keen feeling-his literary and historical references are many and layered, but never does he lose his capacity for concrete intimacy, for addressing, say his own nipple. "May you mackerel / with majesty," declares another poem, and I believe that I will do just that, for I am swayed by its sound-and by, yes, the tenderness." -Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017) and Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022)
From the advance praise at the back of my collection: "Often, “the work of living”—especially the work of minoritized living—is the work of coming to understand how we have been shaped by violent, tender inheritances and laboring, slowly, to become our own shapes. In this tradition, Travis Chi Wing Lau’s What’s Left Is Tender is a virtuosic act of crip/queer/ diasporic formalism. The poems curve and fracture and hobble and speak across their own gaps; they work with and against received poetic forms; they take up unexpected postures on the page. And, through this careful attention to form, Lau is able to attend with as much care to the tender knots of queer shame and desire, family inheritance as debt and condition of possibly, medicine as violence and promise of relief. In this way, line by line, Lau carries his reader through a “quiet manifesto” on what it takes to truly honor and be directed by the queer, crip, and otherwise “deviant will // that shapes our form,” on the futures available to us if we attend, with each other, to their “soft making.” —Cameron Awkward Rich, author of Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), Transit (Button Poetry, 2017), Dispatch: poems (Persea Books, 2019), and The Terrible We: Thinking With Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022)
Stonewall Columbus' Pride 2025 T-shirt featuring a 60s style heart with rainbow paint bursting out of it with the text "United in Power"
The cover of my collection of poems, What's Left Is Tender, which features a watercolor image of a bearded, dark haired man floating in water with lotuses around him
The cover design of my poetry collection, What's Left Is Tender, which features a bearded man floating in water with lotuses.