Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)

@travisclau

(he/him/his) Associate Professor, Crip Queer Poet: c18/c19 British Literature and Culture / Disability Studies / Health Humanities / History of Medicine (immunity and vaccination) travisclau.com

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Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· 20d

New set of books arrived for folks that were waiting! Thanks for being patient with me. As we conclude Disability Pride Month, it would mean the world to me to have you sit with my crip, queer poems ❤️ If you’d like a signed copy, this Google form is still active: forms.gle/QoZUkbqcZBd9...

An open box of three stacks of my book, What's Left Is Tender

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Jul 1

I guess it's official?

A screenshot of my faculty page with the following text:

Kenyon

Travis Chi Wing Lau

Associate Professor of English and Creative
Writing

English and Creative Writing

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Jun 28

Well, fuck.

My bathroom ceiling with major water staining and damage.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Jun 20

Happy Pride, Columbus. Here's to real community that's not fairweather, convenient, or tokenizing. Here's to substatinve relationships that we truly invest in, that mutually sustain us.

Me crowned by the rainbow palette of the System of Colours print. I am wearing a "friend of Garak" shirt featuring an image of him crowned by a rainbow.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Jun 9

As @teagerbeza.bsky.social so kindly reminded me, it’s scoliosis awareness month: spinal curvature has shaped my poetics, my academic labor, and my life entirely.

A closeup of my upper thoracic spinal x-ray.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· May 15

La vie bohème.

Me in a feather mask in front of the Columbus ballet photograph studio

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Apr 24

The President's phone call came at last: I am tenured.

A bottle of Bollinger champagne with two glasses filled.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Apr 20

Absolutely speechless: so honored to be named a finalist for the Clintonville Books inaugural Poetry Award and in such esteemed company.

A dark wooden desk featuring the following books of poetry together:

Diane Callahan and David Dixon's The Ship and the Storm

Darren Demaree's Now Flourish Northern Cardinal

Zoe Brigley's lycanthrope

Danny Caine's Jewish American Dream

Travis Chi Wing Lau's What's Left Is Tender

Emily Patterson's Birth of Undoing

Adrianna Kimbrough's Woman in Pieces

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Apr 8

Finding my way back to my monograph for #ASECS2026. Looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and folks I adore.

A screenshot of my paper's abstract with the following text:

Historicizing Vaccine Injury in Tension with Disability Justice

In this paper, I grapple with one of the thorniest elements of my book project on the literary and cultural history of immunity and vaccination: the history of vaccine injury and the coalition building around its protest. Almost immediately after Edward Jenner popularizes vaccination in the late eighteenth century, medical practitioners, lay healers, and concerned citizens published numerous accounts of vaccine injury, many of which fueled deep anxieties about vaccination's efficacy and medicine's potential harms. This kind of organizing would lead to some of the largest anti-vaccination advocacy groups like the later nineteenth-century National Anti-Vaccination League (NAVL) that specifically responded to compulsory vaccination legislation by claiming vaccines caused widespread disability. On the one hand, these activist coalitions specifically mobilized around shared experiences of debility, disability, and chronic illness (in this case produced by the developing medical establishment that claimed to be invested in staving off these very things). But on the other hand, especially given contemporary disability justice's deep investment in rejecting the long-debunked notion that vaccines cause autism, disability justice would never claim these anti-vaccinators as early disability advocates. How do we tell the history of vaccine injury without reinforcing ableism but also without disavowing the unexpected connections between early anti-vaccinators and disabled people resisting the power of professional medicine and its relationship to the nation?

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Apr 4

Getting to return to UT Austin as a poet-in-residence with the Crip Narratives Collective was such an emotional reunion.

From left to right: Alison Kafer (seated in a wheelchair and in a black and white patterned shirt), myself (in a dark brown suit and holding a copy of What's Left Is Tender), Bassam Sidiki (in a light blue suit with tie), and Julie Minich (in a black sweater with dark denim jeans) in front of bookcases.

Bassam and me seated beside one another at the front of the room where the reading and dialogue was held.

Me with a smile on my face while standing at the podium reading from my book with audience members in the foreground

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Apr 2

Some opportunities really do feel like dreams come true. Beyond thankful for the chance to talk about my work with the Georgetown community and be in dialogue with such a generous audience.

ID: Me on the left wearing a dark red suit with white shirt gesturing mid-sentence beside Georgina Godwin in a dark navy jacket and pants.

ID: shot from the back of the room in the middle of the aisle, this photo features rows of audience members leading to the front where I and Georgina are in conversation. I am in the middle of speaking with my right hand in front of me gesturing.

ID: Me on the left wearing a dark red suit with white shirt beside Georgina Godwin who is in a dark navy jacket and pants and holding my book in her hands.

ID: A stack of copies of What's Left Is Tender on a blue table with salmon-colored bookmarks featuring the authors for the Lannan Center Literary Festival.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Apr 1

Cried a good long while when this arrived in the mail. Thank you Sandy Ho for giving me this opportunity to write in celebration of @sfdirewolf.bsky.social.

Text in red reads: Alice Wong (1974-2025) Celebration of Life. The Asian Art Museum of SF on March 25th, 2026.Red line drawing on marigold background of a Chinese ancestral altar. There are peonies in a vase, a portrait of Alice Wong, incense, and a vase of poppies. Decadent tiers of food are in front of Alice's portrait: peach slices, basket of fries, dumplings, champagne glasses, potato chips, o-toro nigiri, assortment of bao, fruit baskets, dan tat, soondubu jjigae with seafood, chawanmushi, and tangerines. Artwork by Felicia Liang.

Text of my poem:

chan pei（馋裴）
by Travis Chi Wing Lau
we first bonded over gossip, yes, about that curse, the one still haunting the bakery that stays
open barely half the year but kept alive by
its egg custard tarts, which I know you once
savored but can no longer. but this surprises
neither of us: to be sustained by something so
delicate,
so simple, even if it is memory. so when arrived
at your flat to the spread of cakes and mochi donuts,
i tasted first for the bittersweet of a chán pei's grieving,
as if my tongue had known to grieve what was coming.
but i should not have been surprised, for our mouths have always been too sharp (or so our people say) because we were made to learn early how to taste for poison,
to taste for falsehood in a land so tainted by both.
is survival
really anything more than that? no wonder then that we have made
good oracles: our angry bones rattling loudly like a rasping cough trying desperately to clear the world's throat.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Mar 25

After a virtual teaching day, finally off to share some tender verses with the Lannan Center at Georgetown University and very special reunions and first-time meetings with some wonderful people.

A salmon colored flyer with a small circular portrait of me with the cover of What's Left Is Tender beneath. The following text is on the left in a white box:

WRITING THROUGH CHANGE WITH TRAVIS LAU

Join us on March 26th for an evening of music, poetry, food, and fun with a live performance from Hieroglyph and The Georgetown Phantoms.
Poet Travis Chi Wing Lau, author of What's Left Is Tender, joins radio host Georgina Godwin for an intimate conversation about his powerful exploration of disability, chronic pain, queerness, and family silence.

THURS 26 MARCH
DISABILITY CULTURALCENTER
6:00 PM

RSVP: WRITINGTHROUGHCHANGE2026.REGISTER

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Mar 23

Beyond excited and honored to be a part of this. Still pinching myself.

A pink flyer featuring the following text along headshots and photos of student performers and covers of authors' respective books:

2026
LANNAN LITERARY FESTIVAL
WRITING THROUGH CHANGE

FEATURING AUTHORS:
JULIA ALVAREZ
TRAVIS LAU
SALMAN RUSHDIE

THE GRACENOTES
THE HIEROGLYPHS
THE PHANTOMS

SPECIAL PERFORMANCE BY:
THE GLOBAL LAB
MARCH 24, 26, 31

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Feb 22

This is what 36 looks like (I feel like I don't even recognize myself here.)

A black and white portrait of me without glasses and in a chambray shirt while sitting in front of my bookshelves, which are blurred in the background.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Feb 17

Beyond excited to be returning to UT Austin from March 8-15 for a residency with The Crip Narratives Collective (much love to Bassam Sidiki, Julie Avril Minich, and Alison Kafer for bringing me back!).

A beige poster with the following text:

Crip Tenderness:
A Poetry Reading with Travis Chi Wing Lau

Dr. Travis Chi Wing Lau holds a B.A. in
English/Classics from UCLA and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies at Kenyon College.

5:00 PM
March 12, 2026
Carothers Residence Hall
Joynes Reading Room

Support provided by a grant from The Mellon Foundation, Crip Narratives Collective, and The Humanities Institute

It also includes images of each of my book covers and QR codes to rsvp for the event and to learn more about me.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Feb 4

Trying to wrap my head around the fact I'm turning 36 in a few weeks. I feel like I'm starting over in so many ways in my life, where this new year feels like the cusp of lasting change. I'm honestly scared as hell but ready to feel better in this body and in this life of mine.

Me in a baby suit and carnation pink shirt at my desk with my bookcases behind me.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Jan 28

I cried a little bit when I opened the mail yesterday. I joined the editorial team for this new anthology of disability poetry in 2020 when I was so deeply uncertain about whether I'd have a job, so deeply isolated and scared for the future at a time of mass pandemic disablement.

The cover of Every Place on the Map Is Disabled: Poems and Essays featuring Adrean Clark's "Perseverance" against a beige background with the text "edited by Camisha L. Jones, Michael Northen, Naomi Ortiz, and Travis Chi Wing Lau"

The acknowledgments for the anthology with the following text:

For our collective thriving and brilliance. In tribute to all of those we've lost to systemic failure. For crip kin and communities who claimed me in my early days of Disabled identity and introduced me to the miracle of access intimacy. May the words of all these mighty poets likewise help us find strength, find our way to one another.
—Camisha L. Jones

I'm grateful to those who have traveled the disability poetry route with me: the Inglis House Poetry Workshop, the staff of Wordgathering, and all who contributed to Beauty is a Verb. First and foremost, however, I am thankful to my family for hanging in with me through it all.
-Michael Northen

For the Crip ancestors, including Marlin D. Thomas and Kellie Haigh. For Zach, Jean, Tom, and Rachel; thanks for being you; and for sharing café, time, and love with me. Por mi cuerpo hermos@. Por la tierra, las comunidades, y los linajes that made me.
-Naomi Ortiz

For crip kin—past, present, and future.
—Travis Chi Wing Lau

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Jan 12

Entering into this new semester of teaching with a lot of clarity. May it be gentler than the last.

Me in a tan suit and white shirt sitting beneath my bookshelves.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Jan 7

I don't think I ever imagined I'd be part of a lineup like this, but I am beyond excited to be reading from What's Left Is Tender this March at Georgetown's Lannan Center as a part of the annual Lannan Literary Festival: lannan.georgetown.edu/symposia/wri...

A peach colored flyer featuring the portraits of Julia Alvarez, myself, and Salman Rushdie with our names beneath them and the following text above:

Georgetown University
2026 Lannan Literary Festival
Writing Through Change

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Jan 1

A joy to start the year seeing one of the very first poems toward my new project about faith(lessness) and the divine. Thank you, Allison Blevins, for believing in my work again and Jill Khoury for again giving my work a home at @rogueagent.bsky.social: www.rogueagentjournal.com/tlau

A screenshot of my poem published in Rogue Agent

BESEECH ME NO MORE

my crooked child,
for your keenest edges arrive
implied in reddened eyes,
which gaze to trace how
mercy never left this world,
long pronounced doomed
before i ever did. no,
though you stared at it all
enough to grow so stony,
you still curve into living
like the currents that first
bore you. you grovel for
succor and its thousand
handmaidens, but really it is
pardon you crave as if it were
ever mine to give you. cease
now your begging for refuge
in some other form that brays
against the mechanics of your
life bent toward an aching good.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Jan 1

Here's to a better year for all of us.

Me in a green velvet blazer next to a framed portrait of text in red that reads "how lucky are we?"

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Dec 22

Finally finished grading and done with this semester that's left me with an exhaustion that feels bone deep. I think I'm only now realizing how significant my ADHD burnout and dysregulation have been and how much it's going to take to recover from it.

A black and white close up of my cat Mercury on his side asleep with his face and paw pressed against my leg

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Dec 11

Last day of teaching for this semester of so many challenges and triumphs. So depleted but also proud of the work I've managed to do in trying circumstances. Fingers crossed for so much ahead.

Me in a grey blazer and white shirt seated beneath white bookshelves.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Dec 2

From WHAT'S LEFT IS TENDER: a poem in honor of my former partner who passed from AIDS-related opportunistic infectons and in gratitude of the AIDS poets who shaped so much of my formation as a gay man and poet. Monette taught me about the power of queer anger, and it has suffused my work.

uñviç

After Paul Monette

they pricked you enough times until there was nothing left to draw but from the remaining vein of obscenity you held in abeyance for so long they kept claiming it was starting to take over the whole of you like a virus like a fucking virus that they cannot even call by a proper name other than one conflated with a set of conditions less opportune than their profitmaking their prescription pad that even the oracles couldn't decipher because we are a brotherhood bound to be kept in the dark and dying in the dark unless we break silence like they break bodies and soon you won't be in the streets with me and I will have to carry your wit as memory as weapon because it was always sharper sharp enough to cut the cosmos and grab gods by the white of their throats damn it I tried to shake the tinnitus of that damn vitals monitor but it is all I can hear aside from the time you told me I was worth more than the pain that you now know better than anyone who comes by with vases full of things that will live longer than you and fail to comfort me when I am left alone with them and this sheet you have imprinted with your sigil for me to carry like a banner into war when I have tried so long to flee from it and the graves that hold so many of the unnamed who died alone so no more of this life of luxury this life of pacifism because they continue to pronounce our death but our right is refusal our right is to survive when we were already supposed to be in the ground

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Nov 27

I recently got digital copies of my most recent x-rays, and seeing my spinal curvature for what it is always has the sobering effect of reminding me that my pain is real, that this is what I carry as part of my daily lived experience.

Lumbar x ray of my spine featuring curvature to the right.

Neck xray with vertebrae twisted to the left

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Nov 19

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Nov 18

Beginning to teach my death, dying, and palliative care unit in class while grieving might be the cruelest irony

Me in a herringbone suit with white shirt sitting at my desk with bookshelves behind me

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Nov 8

One of those weeks in a series of months that have been testing every limit. But I'm here. Somehow.

Me on the couch with my grey tabby Mercury on my lap.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)@travisclau· Oct 24

Heart so full this evening after a second book celebration with my dear colleague, Michael Leong, but this time with our Kenyon College community. To my colleagues and students who came, thank you, thank you, thank you.