Derek Mong is a poet, essayist, and translator. Since 2016 he has taught at Wabash College, where he’s currently an Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department. From 2008-2010 he held the Axton Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Louisville, where he designed and coordinated “The Soul That Grows in Darkness: The Axton Festival of Film and Verse.” From 2006-2007 he held the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has previously taught at the University of Michigan, SUNY-Albany, Stanford University, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, and with young writers workshops at Kenyon College and Denison University, his alma mater.
His awards include The Missouri Review’s Editors’ Choice Prize, an LA Press Club Award for art commentary, six Pushcart nominations, the Wolverine Farms Broadside Poetry Contest, two Hopwood Awards, a residency from Willapa Bay AiR, and the Cliff Becker Translation Prize (with his wife and co-translator, Anne O. Fisher). His poems, translations, and prose have appeared in the Southern Review, Crazyhorse, the Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Michigan Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, Two Lines, Court Green, and other venues, including 99 Poems for the 99 Percent (2014) and Writers Resist: Hoosier Writers Unite (2017).
His first book, Other Romes (Saturnalia Books) appeared in 2011. His second, The Identity Thief (Saturnalia Books), was published in 2018. A third, When the Earth Flies into the Sun, is forthcoming from Saturnalia in 2024. A chapbook of his Latin adaptations, The Ego and the Empiricist (2017), was a finalist for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. In the fall of 2018, he and his wife, Anne O. Fisher, published The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin, a collaborative translation from the Russian. This project was supported by an NEA grant for Translation.
His scholarly interests center around poetry, 19th century American Literature, and Walt Whitman. His doctoral dissertation at Stanford examines the role that marriage plays in the lives and afterlives of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. His texts included Edward Weston’s illustrated edition of Leaves of Grass (1942), with captions provided by his wife, Charis Wilson; Jerome Charyn’s The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (2010); and a steampunk novella, “Walt and Emily” (1995), in which the two poets fall in love. In one chapter he examines Whitman and Dickinson’s role in American weddings, both gay and straight. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan, where he received a Cornwell Fellowship. He was the Dunbar Scholar in the Humanities at Denison.
Born in Portland, Oregon, and raised outside of Cleveland, he has lived in San Francisco, Western Massachusetts, and throughout the Midwest. He and his wife, Anne O. Fisher, return to Portland as often as possible. They currently live with their son in West Lafayette, Indiana.