All the Sides of a Heart: Poems on Love and Nature

Mei-Lin King was born in Shanghai, China, and was educated in Taiwan and the United States. She started writing poetry in Chinese when she was a schoolgirl in Taipei, Taiwan. She fell in love with classic and contemporary Chinese poetry and was later influenced by the Chinese translations of the poems by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941, India). After graduating from graduate school in the U.S., she began to write poetry in English. She read anthologies of American and French poets and admired the poems by John Masefield. She was moved by the poems by the Finnish poet Edith Sodergran (1892-1923), the haiku poems by Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828, Japan), and the poems by Octavio Paz (1914-1998, Mexico).

Mei-Lin has published her poems in local newspapers and publications of a hospital where she worked. In addition to literature, she enjoys classical music and jazz, cooking, gardening, pencil drawing, dancing, and daily exercises. She has won many dance awards.