Dean Brink

Dean Anthony Brink’s paintings, poetry, and fiction chronicle changing cultural horizons and an impulse to overcome categories—of love, nationality, how we see and are seen. From Tacoma, Washington, raised by an immigrant mother, he is now an immigrant father himself in Taiwan, enjoying dual nationality. Reflecting the complications of living across cultures in the shadow of geopolitics, his poetry and artwork seek to explore paths to peace by way of social and ecological justice, and the building of greater empathy in the world through a sort of traveling humor. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cordite Poetry Review, Ecozon@, Going Down Swinging, New Writing (UK), Nimrod, Plant Perspective, Wayfarer, and many other venues. No Time and Other Poems, plus The Threepenny Space Opera and A Migrant Homecoming is his first collection (Goldfish Press, 2024). He also publishes speculative fiction set in Taiwan and the Pacific Northwest, and is author of several research monographs, including Poetics and Justice in America, Japan, and Taiwan: Configuring Change and Entitlement (Lexington Books, 2021) and Philosophy of Science and the Kyoto School: An Introduction to Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime and Tosaka Jun (Bloomsbury, 2021).

University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Ph.D., Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, March 2003
Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
Dissertation research, Japanese literature and history.
Autumn 1994 – Spring 1996
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington
M.A., Comparative Literature, 1989
B.A., English Literature, 1987

“No More UFOs” Solo Exhibition by Dean Brink—Home under the Big Chimney
October 19, 2024 – December 1, 2024

A Dozen Paintings
Part of The Sixth Fuel Factory Documenta: Tracing the Origin of the Sixth Fuel Factory along the Touquian River
June 2 - July 19, 2025