Derek Mong was the 2008 – 2010 Axton Fellow in Poetry at the University of Louisville, where he taught literature, creative writing, and hosted “The Soul That Grows in Darkness: The Axton Festival of Film and Verse.”  From 2006 – 2007 he was the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has previously taught at the University of Michigan, SUNY-Albany, and with young writer’s workshops at Kenyon College and Denison University, his alma mater. While living in the Berkshires he held classes at Edna St. Vincent Millay’s home in Austerlitz, New York.  In the fall of 2010 he began a PhD in English Literature at Stanford University.

His awards include The Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Choice Prize, two Pushcart nominations, Alehouse’s Happy Hour Poetry Award, and two Hopwoods. His poems, translations, and prose have appeared in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, The Kenyon Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, Colorado Review, Court Green, and Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes (C & R Press, 2009). He holds an MFA from The University of Michigan. In 2011 Saturnalia Books will publish his debut collection, Other Romes.

Born in Portland, Oregon, and raised outside of Cleveland, Ohio, he currently lives with his wife, the translator Anne O. Fisher, in San Francisco. Together they are translating the selected poems of Maxim Amelin (Russian, b. 1970), tentatively titled The Joyous Science.  This project was awarded a 2010 NEA grant for Literary Translation.  In September 2010 he and Annie became parents of a newborn son.