Subscribe to our newsletter
“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 at the 2023 National Book Awards Finalist Reading
Monica Youn is the author of four poetry collections, most recently From From, which was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was a Finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Voelcker Award and longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Her previous book Blackacre was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kingsley Tufts Award and the PEN Open Book Award and Longlisted for the National Book Award. Her book Ignatz was also a Finalist for the National Book Award. Youn has been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the William Carlos Williams Award by the Poetry Society of America, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship. A former constitutional lawyer, she is a member of the curatorial collective the Racial Imaginary Institute and is professor of English at UC Irvine.
(Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan)
no content
