José Olivarez and Monica Youn

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Poetry at Bennington welcomes poets José Olivarez and Monica Youn for a public reading of their poetry.

José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants and the author of two poetry collections: Promises of Gold (Henry Holt, 2023), a USA Today Book Club pick; and Citizen Illegal (Haymarket, 2018), a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and winner of the Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize, named a top book of 2018 by NPR and the New York Public Library. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Rumpus. He is coeditor of the poetry anthology The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext (Haymarket, 2020). In 2019, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Photo credit: Marcos Vasquez

Monica Youn is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently From From (Graywolf, 2023). Her previous collection Blackacre (Graywolf, 2016) received the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN Open Book Award, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Ignatz (Four Way, 2010) was a National Book Award finalist. The daughter of Korean immigrants, a Rhodes Scholar, and a former lawyer with a JD from Yale Law School, Youn is an associate professor in the UC Irvine creative writing program and a member of the Racial Imaginary Institute. Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan