Sun Yung Shin (born 1974) is a Korean American poet, writer, consultant, and educator living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
She is the editor of "A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota" (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016), author of "The Wet Hex" (Coffee House Press 2022), "Unbearable Splendor" (Coffee House Press 2016), Rough, and Savage (Coffee House Press, 2012), Skirt Full of Black (Coffee House Press, 2007), and the bilingual (English/Korean) illustrated children's book Cooper's Lesson (Children's Book Press, imprint of Lee & Low Books). She was an editor with Jane Jeong Trenka and Julia Chinyere Oparah for Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (South End Press, 2006), the first international anthology on the politics of transracial adoption edited by transracial adoptees. Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption was released in a Korean-language edition by KoRoot Press in Seoul, South Korea, in 2012.[1]
Biography
Shin was born in Seoul, South Korea, and was adopted when she was 13 months during the second big wave of the adoption of Asian children.[2] She was adopted by a white couple and was raised and grew up in Chicago.[3][4][5]
She attended Boston University for one year and then transferred to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota and graduated cum laude with a degree in English.[6] After graduating, she worked for a technology companies whose clients included United Health, The US Navy, and Pillsbury to pay off her college loans and pursue a master's degree.[6] While in the process of obtaining her master's degree in teaching from the University of St. Thomas, she took a course on adolescent literature from playwright John Fenn.[7] He liked a poem she wrote and took it home for his partner Jill Breckenridge to read. She loved it and encouraged Shin to continue writing poetry.[5] Afterwards, she became the poetry editor of the campus literary magazine for Macalester College. From 2001 to 2002, Shin was in SASE: The Write Place mentor program with Minnesota poet Mark Nowak.[8] Through the Loft's program, she was mentored by Wang Ping.[8]
Shin won the Asian American Literary Award in 2008 for her book of poems Skirt Full of Black. Shin's essays and fiction are anthologized in Fiction on a Stick (Milkweed), Riding Shotgun (Borealis), Transforming a Rape Culture (Milkweed), Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writings (Temple University), The Encyclopedia Project Vol. 1, A-E, Vol. 2, F - K, and The Adoption Encyclopedia (Greenwood Publishing). She also received the Minnesota Book Award in 2017 for her book Unbearable Splendor.[10]
She is a recipient of grants and awards from the (Archibald) Bush Foundation, two time award recipient of Minnesota State Arts Board, Blacklock Nature Sanctuary, and The Loft Literary Center, and recipient of an artist's grant from the McKnight Foundation.[11] She is also a 2022 MacDowell Residency Fellow.[12]
In 2023, she won the Carter G. Woodson Book Award (Elementary Level) for Where We Come From.[13]
Edmonia Lewis: Wildfire in Marble by Rinna Evelyn Wolfe (1999)
Princess Ka'iulani: Hope of a Nation, Heart of a People by Sharon Linnea (2000)
Tatan'ka Iyota'ke: Sitting Bull and His World by Albert Marrin (2001)
Multiethnic Teens and Cultural Identity by Barbara C. Cruz (2002)
The "Mississippi Burning" Civil Rights Murder Conspiracy Trial: a Headline Court Case by Harvey Fireside (2003)
Early Black Reformers by James Tackach (2004)
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 edited by Robert H. Mayer (2005)
No Easy Answers: Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement by Calvin Craig Miller (2006)
Dear Miss Breed: True Stories of the Japanese-American Incarceration During World War II and a Librarian Who Made a Difference by Joanne Oppenheim (2007)
Don't Throw Away Your Stick Till You Cross the River: The Journey of an Ordinary Man by Vincent Collin Beach with Anni Beach (2008)