Wendy Chin-Tanner Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Graphic Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Wendy Chin-Tanner is a published author and poet.

Wendy Chin-Tanner is known for her novel King of the Armadillos as well as the author of the poetry collection TURN and the poetry collection Anyone Will Tell You. She was also a finalist for the Oregon Book Award.

Wendy serves as the editor of EMBODIED: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology. She also is a co-founder of an independent publishing company for graphic novels called A Wave Blue World.

Wendy was born in New York City, where she grew up. She resides with her family in the Hudson Valley. She attended Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, studying English literature and sociology.

She has been published in different journals and publications that extend to Salon, Gay Magazine, The Rumpus, the Academy of American Poets, The Collagist, The Kenyon Review, DAME Magazine, Literary Hub, and more.

Wendy has also been featured on ABC News Live Prime, with Linsey Davis and NPR. She has also been a staff interviewer at Lantern Review and a founding editor of KIN Poetry Journal and a poetry editor at The Nervous Breakdown.

King of the Armadillos is the debut fictional book from Wendy Chin-Tanner. It was named the best book of summer 2023 by Deep South Magazine, The Boston Globe, BookRiot, and Ms. Magazine. BookBrowse also named it one of the top twenty books of 2023. Cheryl Strayed called the book ‘brilliant’ and The New York Times referred to it as a ‘gripping and tenderly executed drama’. Get a copy to read for yourself if the following description seems interesting to you!

This is the story about love, about a family, about the chance to belong. Set up against the background of New York City and Louisiana in the fifties, this is about one young man and his goal to try and get through a disease that can often be misunderstood and his struggle to find himself and music and love and more while going through this.

Main character Victor Chin has found that his life has been completely rearranged and done so in an insulting fashion since he is so young. Everything changes when he finds out that he has been diagnosed as having Hansen’s disease, which also goes by the term leprosy.

For Victor, everything immediately changes. He has to leave his father’s laundry business located in the Bronx for quarantine. This has been the only home that he has ever had since he came over with his older brother from China.

Now he has to be in quarantine in Carville along with other patients from all over America in a federal institution. Victor is very scared at first, not so much by the disease alone but also of being confined. His greatest instinct is to just get out of there and flee for something better.

He dreams of doing whatever he can to escape between the treatments and starts to imagine the life that he would live as a fugitive. He is surprised when he discovers a different sense of freedom so far from his home and the familiar. Here his ties to his family, the laundry business, his mother in China do not pull at him and obligate him.

With a ton of characters, Victor is able to find some solace in music and different experiences. He’s able to go through the experience of first love, betrayal, jealousy, and tragedy. But there could be a cure coming down the line that makes all of this illness go away.

Victor knows that he has limited time to be at Carville, and now he is going to have to make some serious choices. This historical fiction work could be the beginning of something great as Wendy Chin-Tanner debuts an incredible first story that is inspired by the true life story of her father being a patient at a young age at Carville. An incredible work that will have you turning the pages from start to finish!