Sun Yung Shin 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", author of "Unbearable Splendor", Rough, and Savage, Skirt Full of Black, the bilingual illustrated children's bookCooper's Lesson and she was an editor with Jane Jeong Trenka and Julia Chinyere Oparah for Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, 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 and Education
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. She was adopted by a white couple and was raised and grew up in Chicago. A week after her arrival to Chicago, her new brother asked,"When is she going back?".During her childhood, she saw many African Americans being subjected to prejudice and even though they were not of the same race they were both minorities. In a way she felt a sort of kinship with them and this lead her down the path of becoming an equal rights activist. 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. After graduating,she worked for a technology companies whose clients included United Health, The US Navy and Pillsbury to pay off er college loans right away to pursue a master's degree. 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. He liked a poem she wrote and took it home for his wife Jill Breckenridge to read. She loved it and is the person who encouraged Sun Yung Shin to continue writing poetry. After taking a liking to poetry she became the poetry editor of the campus literary magazine for Macalester College. In 2001 to 2002, Shin was in SASE:The Write Place mentor program with Minnesota poet Mark Nowak. Through the Loft's program Shin was mentored by Wang Ping. 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 Minnesota, Macalester College, Hamline University, 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 frequently in the Twin Cites. Shin has been asked many times if she is trying to find her biological parents and her answer is no. She says her adoption experience is a violent trauma and the central experience of her life and only those who are adopted would understand.
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, Riding Shotgun, Transforming a Rape Culture, Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writings, The Encyclopedia Project Vol. 1, A-E, Vol. 2, F - K, and The Adoption Encyclopedia. She is a recipient of grants and awards from the Bush Foundation, two time award recipient of Minnesota State Arts Board and the Jerome Foundation, Blacklock Nature Sanctuary, and The Loft Literary Center. 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.
