Sun Yung Shin

This is a Korean name; the family name is Shin.

Sun Yung Shin
Born	1974 (age 49–50) Seoul, South Korea
Nationality	American
Korean name
Hangul	신선영
Revised Romanization	Sin Seon-yeong
McCune–Reischauer	Sin Sŏnyŏng

Sun Yung Shin (born 1974) is a Korean American poet, writer and educator living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

She is the author of Rough, and Savage (Coffee House Press, 2012), Skirt Full of Black (Coffee House Press, 2007), the bilingual (English/Korean) illustrated children's book Cooper's Lesson (Children's Book Press an imprint of Lee & Low Books) and 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.

Early years

Shin was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up in Chicago as the adopted child of a Polish-Irish-German Catholic American family.

She attended Boston University for one year and then transferred to Macalester College in St. Paul and graduated cum laude with a degree in English. She has a master's degree in teaching and a 5-12 teaching license in Language Arts and Communication from the University of St. Thomas and currently lives in Minneapolis.

She has worked teaching literature, media reform and creative writing at the Perpich Center for Arts Education and also taught composition and creative writing at the University of St. Thomas, The College of St. Catherine, The Loft Literary Center and Intermedia Arts/SASE: The Write Place. She has also taught English as second language and has been a guest artist in many inner city schools in the Minneapolis-St Paul. She has been involved in the groundbreaking but now defunct Asian American Renaissance and as a board member on many other community organizations. Shin presents her work, lectures and participates on conference panels related to writing, education, anti-racism and adoption.

Shin's career has frequently involved professions connected to technology and writing and she has worked as a freelance journalist, technical writer, editor and web content manager and software test analyst. After college she worked for a decade in the private sector as a business analyst/consultant for corporations such as Pillsbury (now General Mills), UnitedHealth Group (now Optum) and the U.S. Department of Defense.

In 2012, she founded an online literary journal called This Spectral Evidence which "aims to feature work by poets and writers producing startling visions of what our world is and could yet become".

Additional writing and awards

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 is a recipient of grants and awards from the (Archibald) Bush Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board and the Jerome Foundation.

Her poems have appeared in journals such as Indiana Review, Swerve, Court Green, Mid-American Review, Sonora Review, Capilano Review and Xcp cross-cultural poetics.

External links

• Sun Yung Shin's official website
• This Spectral Evidence, a literary journal edited by Sun Yung Shin
• A review of Rough, and Savage
• A review of Skirt Full of Black
• An interview with Sun Yung Shin by Asian American Press
• An entry on Sun Yung Shin at Winter Red Press
• An interview with Sun Yung Shin about Outsiders Within for The Twin Cities Daily Planet
• The 11th Annual Asian American Literary Awards