Monica Sok

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Monica Sok is a Cambodian American poet and professor. She published Year Zero in 2015, a chapbook selected for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, and A Nail the Evening Hangs On in 2020 with Copper Canyon Press. Her writing explores myth-making, Cambodian history, intergenerational trauma, and family memory. She is the daughter of Cambodian refugees who fled Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, and she grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in a Theravada Buddhist family. Her grandmother Em Bun was a Cambodian American weaver who received an NEA National Heritage Fellowship in 1990.

At American University she started writing poetry, attended open mics, and earned a BA in International Studies. She considered a career in foreign service before pursuing writing, taking workshops and studying with Yusef Komunyakaa at NYU. Encouraged by her professor David Keplinger, she pursued an MFA in Creative Writing at NYU. Sok’s poems have appeared in The Washington Post, Poets.org, The Paris Review, The New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Narrative Magazine, and more, and she has been interviewed by Electric Literature, LitHub, and The Normal School.

She joined Kundiman, becoming a Kundiman Fellow and writing about Cambodian history and the Cambodian genocide. She won the 2015 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Year Zero (500 copies were printed). From 2016 to 2018 she was the Stadler Fellow in Poetry at Bucknell University, attended Hedgebrook, and in 2017 received an NEA Literature Fellowship. In 2018 she won the 92Y Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest for “ABC for Refugees.” She was a Literary Fellow at the Montalvo Arts Center and then a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2018 to 2020. In 2020 she released A Nail the Evening Hangs On, became a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, and taught Asian American literature. She has taught Southeast Asian youth in Oakland, where she is based. In 2022 she participated in MacDowell and worked on a second poetry collection and a screenplay. From 2023 to 2024 she was named the Soniat Reader in poetry for the Virginia Tech MFA program.