Staceyann Chin

Staceyann Chin, born December 25, 1972, in Jamaica, is a spoken-word poet, performing artist, and LGBTQ rights activist of Chinese-Jamaican and Afro-Jamaican descent. She has lived in Brooklyn, New York, and has been an openly lesbian poet and political activist since 1998. Chin credits her accomplishments to her grandmother and to the pain of her mother's absence.

Chin appeared on Broadway in 2002 in Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam, which she also co-wrote. The production received a Tony nomination and earned Chin a Drama Desk Award in 2003. Prior to her Broadway run, she performed one-woman shows at the Bleecker Theatre in New York, including Hands Afire in 2000 and Unspeakable Things in 2001. She has also performed at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and has held poetry workshops worldwide. A subsequent one-woman show, Border/Clash: A Litany of Desires, was staged at the Bleecker Theatre in 2005, and Motherstruck! ran in Chicago, Washington D.C., and New York City between 2015 and 2016. The Joseph Papp Public Theater has featured her on multiple occasions, and she has performed internationally in London, Denmark, Germany, and South Africa, as well as at New York's Central Park SummerStage.

Her competition record in spoken-word poetry includes winning the 1998 Lambda Poetry Slam, the 1998 and 2000 Slam This!, the 1999 Chicago People of Color Slam, and WORD: The First Slam for Television. She was first runner-up in the 1999 Outright Poetry Slam and a finalist in the 1999 Nuyorican Grand Slam. In 2015, Equality Forum named her one of their 31 Icons of LGBTQ History Month.

Chin's written work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Pittsburgh Daily, and she has been featured on 60 Minutes and The Oprah Winfrey Show, where she discussed her experiences growing up as a gay person in Jamaica. Her chapbooks include Wildcat Woman, published in 1998, and Stories Surrounding My Coming, published in 2001, along with several subsequent chapbooks. Her autobiographical prose work, The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir, was published in 2009 by Scribner. Her first full-length poetry collection, Crossfire: A Litany for Survival, was published in 2019 by Haymarket Books and received an American Book Award in 2020. Her poetry also appears in numerous anthologies, including Role Call and Poetry Slam, and her voice can be heard on CD compilations from Bar 13 and Pow Wow productions.

In 2009, Chin performed in The People Speak, a documentary film based on historian Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. She served as a host on Logo's After Ellen internet show She Said What? and as a co-host of Centric's My Two Cents. She taught a seminar at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn. In 2024, she was the subject of Laurie Townshend's documentary film A Mother Apart.

Chin announced in 2011 that she was pregnant with her first child, a daughter born in 2012 through in-vitro fertilization. She wrote about her experiences as a pregnant, single lesbian in a guest blog for HuffPost. Among the honors she has received are the Center for Women and Gender at Dartmouth College's Visionary-in-Residence Award in 2007, the Human Rights Campaign Power of the Voice Award in 2007, the Lesbian AIDS Project Honors in 2008, the Safe Haven Award from Immigration Equality in 2008, and a New York State Senate Special Human Rights Award in 2009.