Meet Our New Intern: Penny Wei

My name is Penny Wei and I am from Shanghai, China, currently living in Massachusetts. I am a Virgo, slow-walker, and an admirer of lakes, botanical gardens, and cherries.

Ever since I was a child, I loved to do two things: daydream and write.

Adults often scolded me for staring too long at what didn’t exist. I would nod, turn away, and return to the plot unfolding in my head. Words on a page became my bridge to imagination — only through the exertion of language could I give shape to the formless, wandering visions inside me. I rooted myself in paper; the page drank my ink, and I drank what later shaped my soul.

For a long time, I was a prose writer — I even despised poetry. To me, poetry felt like nonsense: strange metaphors merging things without reason. Why should my mother be a tree if her skin wasn’t bark? Why should poppy seeds overtake eyes? I was raised in a world where everything had to have meaning, where blue curtains meant sadness because blue meant sorrow. But then I read a poem where blue glowed holy, and suddenly, the rules no longer held.

Poetry became my emancipation — a place where empathy sprawls like vines, where I can mourn the trivial and praise the fleeting. It’s where I can say my mother is a butterfly rinsing black-blooded toenails, and that image is its own truth.

I’m thrilled to join Sundress Publications as an editorial intern, where I can harness this love for language, prose and poetry alike, into supporting others’ work. I look forward to helping writers bring their voices to the page and sharing that joy for the literary arts with our community.

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Penny Wei is from Shanghai and Massachusetts. She has been recognized by the Longfellow House, Cafe Muse, and Just Poetry, amongst others. Her works are up or forthcoming on Eunoia Review, Inflectionist Review, Dialogist, Aloka, and elsewhere.