Meet Author Sun Yung Shin at Fair Trade Books

Chat with Minnesota writer Sun Yung Shin, author of The Wet Hex, during a Meet & Greet and Book Signing event at Fair Trade Books in downtown Red Wing on Thursday, October 27 from noon to 2 p.m.

This outreach event is part of a mini residency supported by SEMAC that is happening in conjunction with Sun Yung’s Books in the Barn reading in the Tower View Barn on Friday, October 28. During her stay, Sun Yung is offering a reading to elders at Tinta Wita Tipi, as well as leading workshops with students at Red Wing High School and Tower View Alternative High School.

신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin (SON-young shin) was born in Seoul, Korea and was raised in the Chicago area. She is a poet, writer, and cultural worker. She is the editor of What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories on Food and Family (2021) and of A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, author of poetry collections Unbearable Splendor (finalist for the 2017 PEN USA Literary Award for Poetry, winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for poetry); Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black (winner of the 2007 Asian American Literary Award for poetry), co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and author of bilingual illustrated book for children Cooper’s Lesson. She lives in Minneapolis where she co-directs the community organization Poetry Asylum with poet Su Hwang.

Sun Yung will be presenting and reading from her newest book, The Wet Hex (Coffee House Press, 2022). Personal and environmental violations form the backdrop against which Sun Yung Shin examines questions of grievability, violence, and responsibility in The Wet Hex. Incorporating sources such as her own archival immigration documents, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Christopher Columbus’s journals, and traditional Korean burial rituals, Sun Yung explores the ways that lives are weighed and bartered. Smashing the hierarchies of god and humanity, heaven and hell, in favor of indigenous Korean shamanism and animism, The Wet Hex layers an apocalyptic revision of nineteenth-century imagery of the sublime over the present, conjuring a reality at once beautiful and terrible.

This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.