Addie Tsai

Genres: Creative Nonfiction, Fiction (YA / spec.), Poetry

Addie Tsai is a queer, nonbinary writer and artist of color. She teaches Creative Writing, Dance, Humanities and Literature at Houston Community College. She has taught creative nonfiction and hybrid writing workshops for The Jung Center of Houston, Inprint Writers Workshops, Kore Press, Lighthouse Writers Workshop Litfest, and elsewhere. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and her PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. The author of the queer Asian young adult novel Dear Twin, Addie is a staff writer at Spectrum South, Associate Editor at Raising Mothers, and Assistant Fiction Editor at Anomaly. She was previously Nonfiction Editor at The Grief Diaries, before it closed permanently in December 2020. She collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. Her work has been published in Foglifter, VIDA Lit, Banango Street, The Offing, The Collagist, The Feminist Wire, Nat. Brut., Honey Literary and elsewhere. Addie is the Founding Editor and Editor in Chief of just femme & dandy, a magazine on fashion for and by the LGBTQIA+ community. She can be found at http://www.addietsai.com, @addiebrook on Twitter and @bluejuniper on Instagram.

Mentor Statement

My journey as a mentor is born directly from my history as a mentee. Although I used to identify as a social introvert, I now see myself as an ambivert, and with that in mind, the mentor-mentee relationship was one most suited to my particular way of being in the world and processing information. To that end, although I keep abreast of research on mentorship, I would say that I mentor intuitively, trying to stay connected to what each individual mentee needs from me as their mentor. I am a firm believer in work-life balance and clear boundaries. Pedagogically and in terms of curriculum, I prefer the hybrid model, in which I will teach any element of craft from multiple angles and perspectives, and with "texts" from a variety of genres. When I use the word text, the quotation marks are intentional, because I see no hierarchy between the written text, such as a book or article, and audiovisual texts, such as a podcast episode, film, television show, music video or a song. I think writers have much to gain from thinking widely about how their work fits within a trajectory of all genres, especially in 2021, where the lines between genres are more fluid than ever before. I see it as my goal to be so intimately connected with the work that my students are engaged with, both thematically and on a craft level, that I will offer texts that cross my mind, or possible prompts that will push the work further, or even questions to answer for themselves, at any time within my working with them, and perhaps even long after we are technically student and faculty. But, I hope to see students take an active investment in seeking out worlds of thought and art that will help them explore the questions their work is asking, in addition to my own investment in pushing their work to the next level. I see my relationship with students (and my relationship as a mentor) as dialogic, one in which I will (hopefully) learn as much as they do. Think of it as a call-and-response, or a question-and-answer or a give-and-take.