EMILY JUNGMIN YOON is a poet, translator, editor, and scholar. She 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. The book was released in Korean as 우리 종족의 특별한 잔인함 (trans. Han Yujoo, Yolimwon 2020). She is also the author of Ordinary Misfortunes, the 2017 winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize by Tupelo Press (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 is currently working on a critical manuscript, Enclosed Reading: A Feminist Method for Contemporary Korean and Korean American Women’s Poetry, 1987-2019.

Yoon’s second full-length poetry collection, Find Me as the Creature I Am, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2024. Yoon is represented by Jin Auh at the Wylie Agency.

Yoon has accepted awards and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Individual works have appeared in The New Yorker, POETRY, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. 

Yoon received her BA in English and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, MFA in Creative Writing at New York University (where she served as an Award Editor for the Washington Square Review and received a Starworks Fellowship), and PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is the 2022-2023 Abigail Rebecca Cohen Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago. She is an Assistant Professor of Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Yoon splits her time between Honolulu and South Korea.