Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award, was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her previous poetry collections are Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Barter (Graywolf Press 2003). She has been awarded the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and the Witter Bynner Fellowship of the Library of Congress, as well as residencies at Civitella Ranieri, the Rockefeller Foundation – Bellagio, Yaddo and MacDowell. A former lawyer and the daughter of Korean immigrants, she currently teaches at Princeton University and in the Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence MFA programs.

According to Linda Gregerson, “Monica Youn, quite simply, is one of the two or three most brilliant poets working in America today.” Of Blackacre, Gregerson has remarked “In these revelatory poems, the reader encounters an exhilarating thinking-through of all that lyric form entails.… This book is a marvel; read it and read it again.” Stanley Fish has described the experience of reading Blackacre as follows: “words and objects are alike subjected to a probing intelligence that is at once philosophical and psychological…. The reader cannot relax for an instant, nor does she want to because the unfolding thought, wire tight and tactile as well as conceptual, is so compelling and demanding of a complete attention that is more than rewarded.” Claudia Rankine has called Youn’s work “disconcerting in its spectatorship and breathtaking in its beauty,” and Stephen Burt has said of Monica Youn, “No poet of her generation has made more demands on herself — and none has done more in her art.”