Mary-Alice Daniel and Cindy Juyoung Ok

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Poetry at Bennington welcomes Mary-Alice Daniel and Cindy Juyoung Ok for a public reading of their poetry.

Mary-Alice Daniel is the author of Mass for Shut-Ins (Yale University Press, 2023), which won the 117th Yale Younger Poets Prize and was referred by competition judge Rae Armantrout as “a Flowers of Evil for the 21st century.” She also wrote the tri-continental memoir A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing (Ecco, 2022), People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, New England Review, and The Yale Review. Born near the Niger/Nigeria border and raised in England and Tennessee, she is a Cave Canem Fellow, served as the inaugural Visiting Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis, and holds the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College.

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward (Yale University Press, 2024), winner of the 118th Yale Younger Poets Prize, and the chapbooks "House Work" (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023) and "Syntaxed" (Poetry Online, 2023). Contest judge Rae Armantrout says of Ok, “She writes in many forms, some invented, but her constant impulse is to break the frame, to escape oppressive containments…Her impulse is to shake things up.” Her work has appeared in Bennington Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Nation, Poetry, and The Yale Review. A MacDowell Fellow, Ok has served as a Poetry Foundation Library Forms & Features visiting teaching artist, and was a reviewer for Harriet Books in 2022–2023.