Creative Writing Past Faculty
Monica Youn
About
Monica Youn is the author of three books of poetry, most recently BLACKACRE (Graywolf Press 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kingsley Tufts Award and the PEN Open Book Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award, as well as being named one of the best poetry collections of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post and BuzzFeed. Her previous book IGNATZ (Four Way Books 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Witter Bynner Fellowship of the Library of Congress, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, among other awards. The daughter of Korean immigrants and a former lawyer, she was raised in Houston, Texas, and now lives in New York.
Linda Gregerson has said that “Monica Youn, quite simply, is one of the two or three most brilliant poets working in America today." In her citation for the William Carlos Williams Award, Robin Coste Lewis writes that in BLACKACRE, “Youn transforms English itself, a vast landscape of repressed histories, into a seemingly black acre, too, an unexplored site, where suddenly the fraught relationships between the body, time, and history are stunningly articulated simultaneously.” John Yau, writing in Hyperallergic, writes that "in every generation there is a handful of poets who challenge the way we think about language and how it is used…. It is to this distinguished company that Youn now belongs.”
She is a member of the curatorial group The Racial Imaginary Institute and chairs the Lewis Center Committee on Race and the Arts.
Links
“The nexus factor: Examining the African American experience” | Princeton University News
Blackacare by Monica Youn named National Book Critics Circle finalist for Poetry | New York Times
Blackacre by Monica Youn named PEN / Open Book Award finalist | PEN America
“Announcing the 2017 William Carlos Williams Award Winner, Monica Youn’s Blackacre” | PoetrySociety
“Four Princeton faculty members win Guggenheim Fellowships” | Princeton University News
2018 Guggenheim Fellowship Award Announcement | Guggenheim Foundation
“The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness” | Symposium — June 30; Exhibition + Residency — June 27-August 3, 2018
Monica Youn awarded 2019 Salmon O. Levinson Prize for her poem, “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë/Sado)” | Poetry Foundation, Sept. 2019
“The power language of Monica Youn” | The Big Bend Sentinel, Jan. 22, 2020
“To Claim What Has Tried to Claim Me: A Roundtable on Asian-American Poetics” — Kevin Young in conversation with Monica Youn, Kimiko Hahn, Paul Tran, and Megan Fernandes | New Yorker Poetry podcast, May 5, 2021