Zell Visiting Writers Series: Reading and Q&A with Monica Youn
Join us in welcoming author and poet Monica Youn for a reading and Q+A as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series, presented by the Helen Zell Writer’s Program in partnership with UMMA, with support from the Department of English Language & Literature.
Youn is the author of four poetry collections, most recently FROM FROM, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award and was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award. It was also named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and Best Poetry Book of 2023 and was a Time, NPR, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Electric Literature Best Book of 2023. She has been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bytter Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship. Her previous books have been shortlisted for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award. A former constitutional lawyer, she is a member of the curatorial collective the Racial Imaginary Institute and is a professor of English at UC Irvine.
Zell Visiting Writers Series readings and Q&As are free and open to the public and will be offered both virtually (via Zoom) and in person (in UMMA’s Stern Auditorium). Seats are offered on a first come, first served basis; please arrive early to secure a spot.
For any questions about the event or to share accommodation needs, please email kimjulie@umich.edu–we are eager to help ensure this event is inclusive to you.
More About Monica Youn
Monica Youn is the author of four poetry collections. Tess Taylor, on NPR’s All Things Considered, declared that “Monica Youn is one of the most consistently innovative poets working today.” As John Yau has put it, “In every generation there is a handful of poets who challenge the way we think about language and how it is used. . . . It is to this distinguished company that Youn now belongs.” Claudia Rankine has called Youn’s work “disconcerting in its spectatorship and breathtaking in its beauty,” and Linda Gregerson says, “Monica Youn, quite simply, is one of the two or three most brilliant poets working in America today.”
SUPPORT
The Zell Visiting Writers Series is a reading series presented by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program in partnership with the University of Michigan Museum of Art, with support from the Department of English Language & Literature, the Office of the Vice President for Research, and Janey Lack.