신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin

신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin is a Korean-born creative nonfiction writer, freelance arts journalist, fiction writer, poet, editor, children’s book author, and frequent public speaker. She is the author of The Wet Hex which won the 2023 Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry and was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award; Unbearable Splendor, a book of essays and poems which won the Minnesota Book Award in 2017; as well as two other books of poetry, one of which won an Asian American Literary Award. She is the editor/co-editor of three anthologies of essays including What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories on Food and Family (2021); A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (2016); and Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (2006 and second edition 2021). She is also the author of two illustrated books for children—most recently the co-authored Where We Come From, which was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award. 

She has a Master of Teaching from the University of St. Thomas and an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from Naropa University. She has been awarded fellowships from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the MacDowell Foundation, as well as an Asian American Literary Award. She has been teaching creative writing in the community and in MFA programs for two decades. Forthcoming books include a picture book about legendary Detroit civil rights activists James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, and other projects. With poet Su Hwang she is the co-founder of Poetry Asylum; she is also a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and elsewhere. She lives in Minneapolis with her family.