Georgia Tech Poet Victoria Chang Named Prestigious National Book Award Finalist

Posted October 7, 2026

Victoria Chang, the Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech, has been named a finalist for a National Book Award for Poetry, one of the nation’s top literary prizes, for her book of poems, Tree of Knowledge.

With the nod, Chang becomes one of just 180 poets named finalist for the prestigious prize since its reinstatement by the National Book Foundation in 1991.

“It's such an honor to have Tree of Knowledge selected as a finalist for the National Book Awards,” Chang said. “My book OBIT was longlisted in 2020 during the pandemic, so it will be nice to celebrate in person in New York with all the other finalists.”

Tree of Knowledge emerged from Chang’s contemplation of the felling of a tree across from her house in Los Angeles, where she was living at the time. It became, as Mother Jones said, “a meditation on abstract art, mortality, language, home, and history.”

“It spiraled out to me writing about trees in paintings that I was thinking about, and then to the expulsion of Chinese people from Eureka, California, in the 1800s,” Chang said. “I also included art that I made from historical photographs of Chinese people in Eureka, so the book threads the personal, the political, the historical, and the environmental.”

The book features not only Chang’s writing, but also her visual art. The collection incorporates original embroidered photo collages created by Chang using 19th-century archival images.

Chang holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from the University of Michigan, a master’s degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard, an MBA from Stanford University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

Her previous collection of poetry, With My Back to the World, earned the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection, while her 2020 book OBIT received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. OBIT was also named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

She also is a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature.

In addition to her endowed chair, Chang teaches in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and serves as the director of Poetry@Tech, leading one of the nation’s premier poetry centers and reading series. Through the work of Poetry@Tech, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, Georgia Tech students across engineering, science, and the humanities learn the value of poetry as craft, literature, and personal expression.

Chang is the second Bourne Chair at Georgia Tech to be named a finalist for the prize. Her predecessor, Ilya Kaminsky, was named a finalist in 2019.

The winners will be announced Nov. 18 in New York.