Biography

Christine Kwon is a Korean American poet and fiction writer. Her debut poetry collection, A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue, won the Cowles Poetry Book Prize. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Project, Joyland Magazine, The Columbia Review, The Harvard Advocate, Copper Nickel, The Xavier Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Hot Pink Mag. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, with her husband and three cats. Follow her on Instagram @theschooloflonging or her website ChristineKwonWrites.com.

Schedule

10:15 am to 11:15 am
State Library, Fifth Floor, Capitol View Room
The Louisiana Poet Laureate Presents Louisiana Poets
with Gina Ferrara, Rodney Jones, Christine Kwon, Justin Lacour, Martha McFerren, Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith, and Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin

11:30 am to 12:15 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue

"These poems luxuriate on elegance in a way that feels entirely necessary, the way Garbo's eyes lit up the Great Depression or Julie London's voice puts you in the moods to open your flower. Kwon's casually gorgeous lines are the best thing since melted butter." — D.A. POWELL

"There are poems who know the names of trees, poets who don’t, and now Christine Kwon, a poet who does know the tree’s name, but who pretends not to, only sharing with her readers the incredible privacy of knowing." — SOPHIA DAHLIN

“Christine Kwon has a playfully no-nonsense way with the agitations of being someone’s child, someone’s partner, someone’s poet, someone’s self. ‘These people inside me/ make me nervous,’ she writes, as her poems briskly and brazenly bear the tumults of inwardness. Kwon suffers no fools, but she does suffer—grief-stricken, defiant and turning to poetry for a salvation she can’t quite trust. This voice is fresh, freshly wounded, clear-eyed, laid bare: ‘They say when you cut into night/ There is no fat/ Only bone.’” — Mark Levine