Monica Youn

Monica Youngna Youn is an American poet and lawyer.

Life
She was raised in Houston, Texas. She graduated from Princeton University, Yale Law School with a J.D., and Oxford University with a M. Phil, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

She is the Brennan Center Constitutional Fellow at New York University Law School. She previously directed the campaign finance reform project at the Brennan Center for Justice. She has appeared on PBS Newshour, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Bill Moyers Journal, and Need to Know (PBS). She is the editor of Money, Politics and the Constitution: Beyond Citizens United. She has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, and the House Committee on Administration.

She was a pledged delegate for Obama in the 2008 presidential election. She has written for Slate, the Los Angeles Times, and the Huffington Post.

Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Gulf Coast, The Paris Review, among other journals. She has given readings at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), on NPR's All Things Considered and was a keynote reader at the 2012 AWP Conference. She has been a visiting professor at Columbia University. She is on the board of the Asian American Writers Workshop and on the Advising Artists Council, for the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her collection Ignatz was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry.

She lives in Manhattan.

Awards

 * Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University
 * Yaddo residency
 * MacDowell fellow
 * 2008 Witter Bynner Fellowship
 * Rockefeller Foundation / Bellagio—Villa Serbelloni,
 * National Book Award Finalist 2010

Works

 * "Venice, Unaccompanied", Poetry Foundation
 * "Titian’s Salome", AGNI 53, 2001
 * "the wedding of ignatz", Tin House Review, Fall 2005



Essays

 * "OF POETRY AND POWER: REFLECTIONS ON THE INAUGURATION", Poetry Foundation