Winniebell Xinyu Zong is a Chinese poet, translator, editor, and novelist. She has served as the 2024–25 Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Winner of the Meridians Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award and the Mellon Fellowship for the Urban Justice Lab, they have published poems in Poetry, Poetry Daily, and the Kenyon Review, among others, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and AWP's Intro Journals Project.
With the nonprofit College Advising Corps, Winniebell mentored more than 200 low- to mid-income high school students through their college matriculation journey, including college essay preparation. Since 2021, she has been a writing consultant for creative writers and higher education applicants. Her college clients have been accepted at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Williams, Rice, Stanford, Berkeley, Northwestern, and Dartmouth, among others. Her MFA and PhD clients have been accepted at Brown, Cornell, Michigan, Yale, Iowa, Howard, NYU, UVA, and Johns Hopkins, among others.
Winniebell is a preliminary judge for the Wisconsin Poetry Series and reads for the Cow Creek Chapbook Prize. Her editorial experience includes serving as associate editor at Pleiades, Frontier Poetry, and EPOCH; editor-in-chief at Touchstone Literary Magazine; chapbook editor at Newfound Press; and publishing intern at Copper Canyon Press. She has led fiction, nonfiction, and poetry workshops at the collegiate level, with classes and speaking engagements at Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Smith College, Kansas State University, and Oakhill Correctional Institution. She has delighted in serving as an Adroit summer program mentor and Ellipsis poetry workshop instructor for cohorts of high school poets.
Selected Creative Work