Chang was born in 1969 in Oklahoma to Taiwanese immigrants, who had met in Montreal, where her mother was working as a nurse and her father was earning his doctorate in physics.

Since fall of 2020, Chang has served as Professor and Director of Creative Writing at her undergraduate alma mater, Binghamton University.

She oversees the Binghamton Center for Writers which includes the Distinguished Writers series, the Global Imagination translation series, Common Ground, a reading series devoted to undergraduate and graduate creative writers, the Binghamton Poetry Project, the Harpur Palate literary journal, the Binghamton Book Awards, and the Writing By Degrees national writing conference.

Along with poets Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, she is the co-editor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008).

[3] The San Francisco Chronicle has described her poetry as "a vast, beautifully fashioned mosaic of indelible, variegated pieces.