BIO

  • Polaroid photo portrait of a man standing in a Tucson neighborhood, with the hoodie of a sweater pulled up over his head.
  • A man with black hair sits in a bathtub that has been placed in a backyard with plants growing all around.
  • Black and white portrait of an Asian-American man in his late twenties. He is wearing a hoodie and sitting in front of a bookshelf.
  • Portrait of an Asian American man in his mid-twenties, with a white sheet tucked into his collar and flowing down in front of him. In the background is an amorphous white sculpture.
  • A man wearing ripped-out pages from a book stands with his arms outstretched.

Cameron Quan is a poet, essayist, and visual artist from Tucson, AZ. He is the author of Repair Attempts (forthcoming from Northwestern University Press, 2027) and the chapbook Apology Engine (Gold Line Press, 2022), selected by Trace Peterson for the Gold Line Press 2020 Chapbook Contest. He received his MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Washington.

Cameron works at the University of Arizona Press and serves on the poetry committee of the Tucson Festival of Books. He was a board member of POG, a Tucson-based poetry and performance nonprofit, from 2018-2021. He has received grants from the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. His poems have been selected for the Best New Poets Anthology and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. You can find his recent work in Electric Lit, The Rumpus, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Fourth Genre, Quarterly West, The Margins, and elsewhere.

If you ever meet Cameron in the wild, here are some helpful tips: he doesn’t mind small talk, especially if it’s about the weather, which he thinks is worthy of our admiration and might be nice next week. He will juggle, perform feats of emotional/physical strength, or whistle a merry tune for you if you give him Pamplemousse La Croix. He wants to know about that movie you love, that book you hate—hot takes, in general, are welcome. He likes feelings, grey sweaters, and riding bicycles at night.