Monica Sok

Monica Sok is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and the​ chapbook Year Zero (Poetry Society of America, 2016). Her early poems mythologize her​ family’s experiences during the Khmer Rouge regime, while also addressing the role of U.S.​imperialism in Cambodia. Through the lens of a second generation daughter, Monica explores growing up with familial silence and comes to terms with intergenerational trauma, passed down by a family of genocide survivors. Her poetry embraces the fragments of a collective memory​ and builds towards wholeness and reclamation.

Monica was born and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where her family resettled as refugees.​ She is the granddaughter of Bun Em, a master silk weaver from Takeo and a 1990 recipient of a​ National Heritage Fellowship for her efforts in the cultural preservation of traditional textiles. Monica followed in her grandmother’s footsteps and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry in 2017.

She earned her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at New York University and received​ fellowships, grants, and residencies from the following: the Elizabeth George Foundation,​ Hedgebrook, the Jerome Foundation, MacDowell, Montalvo Arts Center, Poetry Society of​ America, Saltonstall Foundation, the Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University, and the Wallace​ Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, among others. In 2018, she was recognized with a​ Discovery Poetry Prize from 92Y.

Monica taught as a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where she created a course on Asian​ American Pacific Islander Poetry, which aimed to create grief culture and imagine safer futures​ during an ongoing pandemic and a time of rising anti-Asian violence. She was also a teaching​ artist at Banteay Srei, an organization that serves Cambodian girls and women at-risk of sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. She has taught poetry to Southeast Asian youths at the Center​ for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, California, where she deepened her​ learning about anti-deportation activism. Having grown up in a small town in Pennsylvania, Monica is grateful to find a home within Cambodian communities in California and other cities​ where the Cambodian diaspora is thriving.

Monica currently lives in New York City where she is working on her next book. You may read her poems in The Believer Magazine, Best American Poetry, New England Review,​ New Republic, Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, and The Washington Post.