Monica Youn grew up in Houston, the daughter of Korean immigrants, and now splits her time between Brooklyn and Southern California, where she is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. Her previous poetry collections are Blackacre, Ignatz, and Barter. She has been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award by the Poetry Society of America, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship, among other honors. She has been a Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the PEN Open Book Award. She is a former constitutional lawyer and a member of the curatorial collective the Racial Imaginary Institute.

(Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan)