[2] Chen serves on the poetry faculty for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast.

[3] He served as Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University from 2018 to 2022.

Chen was born in Xiamen, China and grew up in Massachusetts.

[3] Chen completed his Ph.D. in English and creative writing at Texas Tech University, where he was a part-time instructor in composition.

[5] He also edits "the lickety split", a Twitter-based journal that "only publishes poems that fit in a single tweet",[6] alongside his fictional assistant editor Gudetama the Egg.