Emily Jungmin Yoon

Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species(Ecco|HarperCollins 2018), which was released in Korean as 우리 종족의 특별한 잔인함 (trans. Han Yujoo; Yolimwon 2020), and Ordinary Misfortunes, the 2017 winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize by Tupelo Press and selected by Maggie Smith. Also a translator, she has published Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets (Tilted Axis, 2019), a chapbook of poems by Korean women writers. Yoon is represented by Jin Auh at the Wylie Agency.

Yoon was born in Busan, Republic of Korea, and since the age of 10, she has lived in Victoria, BC, Philadelphia, and New York, and currently splits her time between Seoul and Honolulu. She received her BA in English and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and MFA in Creative Writing – Poetry at New York University, where she served as an Award Editor for the Washington Square Review and received a Starworks Fellowship.

She has also accepted awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ ConferencePoetry FoundationDevil’s Kitchen Reading AwardsPloughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, and elsewhere.

Individual works have appeared in The New YorkerPOETRYThe New York Times MagazineThe Paris ReviewKorean Literature Now, and elsewhere.

She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is a PhD candidate in Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

CPC Readings

Poetry by Emily Jungmin Yoon

News

“There’s an article on how to eat an apple.
But I am eating a pear and thinking
pear in Korean is a homonym for ship or boat”

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Soren

“I want to paint you with rainwater:
your window, smoke over slick avenues.
The first time I thought you beautiful,
your lashes blonde lamplight.”

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