Monica Youn is the author of From From (Graywolf Press, 2023), Blackacre (Graywolf Press, 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the best poetry books of 2016 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 been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bytter Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship. Her residencies include those at Civitella Ranieri, the Rockefeller Foundation/Villa Serbelloni, MacDowell, and Yaddo.
A former constitutional lawyer, she is a member of the curatorial collective the Racial Imaginary Institute and is an associate professor of English at UC Irvine. Her fourth book, From From, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press.
At MacDowell in 2006, Youn completed a draft of her poetry manuscript Ignatz, which is based on George Herriman's classic comic strip Krazy Kat. In 2011, she completed poems for her third collection of poems, Kathay. During her 2018 Fellowship, she completed a number of poems for her manuscript-in-progress Cribs, which deals with issues of deracination and racial hierarchy.
