Poet, translator, editor, and scholar Emily Jungmin Yoon will be the featured guest at the next Mostly Monthly Reading Series, a special reading event from 11 a.m. to noon on Thursday, Feb. 27, at the University of Hawai‘i–West O‘ahu’s James & Abigail Campbell Library, second-floor exhibition space.
Yoon, who recently published her second full-length poetry collection, “Find Me as the Creature I Am” (Knopf 2024), will read poetry from her published books, take part in a Q&A session, and have books for sale at the event. There will also be snacks and prize drawings.
According to Yoon’s website, she splits her time between Honolulu and South Korea. Yoon is the author of the full-length poetry collection “A Cruelty Special to Our Species” (Ecco | HarperCollins 2018), winner of the 2019 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
She is also the author of “Ordinary Misfortunes” (Tupelo Press 2017), the 2017 winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize (selected by Maggie Smith), and the translator and editor of “Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets” (Tilted Axis 2019), a chapbook anthology of poems by Korean women writers.
Yoon has accepted awards and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Ploughshares, and more. Individual works have appeared in The New Yorker, POETRY, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere, according to her website.
The Mostly Monthly Reading Series is presented in collaboration between faculty host Andy Godefroy, an English lecturer at UH West O‘ahu, and the James & Abigail Campbell Library.
Godefroy, who started the reading series in 2013, has said about past events, “This reading series is a great opportunity for our university community to interact with the larger literary community in Hawai‘i.”
The Mostly Monthly Reading Series event featuring Yoon is open to UH West O‘ahu students, faculty, and staff, and the general public. Anyone who has questions or would like more info may email godefroy@hawaii.edu.
