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National Book Foundation > Judge > Chair > Monica Youn
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. More about this author >
“Where are you from . . . ? No―where are you from from?” It’s a question every Asian American gets asked as part of an incessant chorus saying you’ll never belong here, you’re a perpetual foreigner, you’ll always be seen as an alien, an object, or a threat. More about this book >
First coined in 1628, the term “blackacre” is a legal fiction, a hypothetical estate. It is also a password among lawyers marking one’s initiation into a centuries-old tradition of legal indoctrination. Monica Youn’s fascinating, multifaceted new collection, Blackacre, uses the term to suggest landscape, legacy, what is allotted to each of us—a tract of land, a work of art, a heritage, a body, a destiny. More about this book >
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)