Last Wednesday, students subscribed to the Poetry Foundation’s daily poem mailing list may have been surprised to see that the featured poem of the day was not by Shakespeare, Neruda, or any of the usual suspects, but by one of their peers — Jessica Jiang ’25.A poet, fiction writer, and playwright, Jiang has been interested in various forms of creative writing since high school. It was not until last year that she submitted her work for publication, not expecting anything to come from it. “March,” Jiang’s featured poem, was accepted by the Poetry Foundation in July, and was published in the most recent issue of their magazine.

Described by Jiang as a love poem, “March” was inspired by her girlfriend, Tiffany Felix ’25. Felix’s first name opens the poem, which is written as a love letter. Jiang played with themes of spring and renewal to convey the profound role that their relationship plays in her life. “It’s like, ‘I’m being broken and remade … even in the action of making this poem because of my love for [Felix],’” Jiang said in an interview with the Record. “I’m reorganizing myself and reorganizing my sense of happiness and sadness because of [her].”

The couple has been together since their first year at the College. Though Felix has been a consistent source of literary inspiration for her, Jiang noted that her love poems have matured and blossomed over the years. “Freshman year, all of the poems I wrote about her were trash,” Jiang said. “[They were] just cheesy and trite: I was like, ‘This is horrible.’” Jiang said that her later years marked a transition for her love poetry, as she began to fully translate her feelings for her girlfriend into her work.

“I have a notes app of things that I think about,” she said. “And one of them says, ‘If all I write are love poems to you, am I a poet, then, or just your lover?’”

Jiang credited her coursework in writing workshops at the College for strengthening her writing. “It was [at] Williams [that] I considered writing to be a serious practice, like something that you have to work at and something that doesn’t come easily,” she said, noting Associate Professors of English Ricardo Wilson and Jessica Fisher as particularly influential teachers. “They both took writing so seriously … and I realized [that writing is] something I want to dedicate myself to.” Jiang continued to take several writing workshop classes at the College on both fiction and poetry.

Though Jiang enjoys several forms of writing, she stresses the difference between writing poetry and prose. When Jiang writes fiction, she can sit down and write as ideas come, but her poetry has to come naturally as she goes about her day, she explained. “For example, in the last stanza of [“March,” I wrote], ‘I opened my coat and your yellow hair flew out like a migrant bird,’” she said, recalling a time she found a strand of Felix’s hair on her coat. “And then there was that moment where I’m like, ‘I’m so happy right now because I found a piece of you on me that you didn’t even think to leave on me,’ … and I felt myself kind of flying.”

 Jiang said her poetry is also inspired by her experience as an immigrant. Her family moved from China to the United States when she was seven years old. They owned a Chinese takeout restaurant, where Jiang spent most of her free time working. Reading helped her through the difficulty of working long hours at the restaurant. “In the quiet moments when there were no customers and I didn’t have to fry chicken wings or make fried rice, I could read and I could be a prince, I could have magic,” she said. The desire to provide a similar literary escape to others is one of Jiang’s strongest motivators. “That ability … to touch other people in this way was what I aspire to be,” she said. 

Though Jiang does not consider novel-writing her strongest skill, she is currently working on a fantasy novel exploring the Asian American experience for her English creative writing thesis, advised by Karen Shephard. “What does it mean to be in a country that is hostile towards your motherland?” she explores in her thesis. “And what does it mean to be a daughter of an immigrant who will never understand you, but is trying to protect you? That’s another theme,” Jiang said. “It’s the hardest thing to write, and it’s the one thing that I most want to succeed at.”

Jiang added that, after graduation, she intends to continue writing and developing as an artist. “I think about the poets I encounter, and I’m like, ‘I’m not even halfway there,’” she said. “It scares me sometimes, because art is such an arbitrary thing, and I’m like, ‘Will I ever be as good as the people that I admire?’ And that frightens me so much, because I want to be.”