Derek Mong is a poet, essayist, translator, and scholar. The Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of English at Wabash College, he has held the Axton Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Louisville and the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin. He also taught at the University of Michigan, SUNY-Albany, Stanford University, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, and with young writers workshops at Kenyon College and Denison University, his alma mater. He received an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in American Literature from Stanford. The author of two poetry collections from Saturnalia Books--Other Romes (2011) and The Identity Thief (forthcoming, 2018)—his work appears widely: the Kenyon Review, Pleiades, the Southern Review, the Brooklyn Rail, Two Lines, Blackbird, Poetry Northwest, New England Review, and elsewhere. He reviews new poetry for the Gettysburg Review and blogs at the Kenyon Review Online. His work has been anthologized in 99 Poems for the 99 Percent (2014) and Writers Resist: Hoosier Writers Unite (2017). His awards include the Missouri Review's Editor's Choice Prize, two Pushcart nominations, and the Artsmith Poetry Prize. Born in Portland, Oregon and raised outside of Cleveland, he now lives in Crawfordsville, Indiana with his wife, Anne O. Fisher. Together they received the 2018 Cliff Becker Translation prize for their collaborative translation of the selected poems of Maxim Amelin (Russian, b. 1970): The Joyous Science. This project was awarded a 2010 NEA grant for Literary Translation. It is forthcoming from White Pine Press. They are the parents of a young son.

Other poems by Derek Mong in Verse Daily:
June 15, 2011:   "Speculation" "Have I cornered you, my self, again..."

Books by Derek Mong:

Other poems on the web by Derek Mong:
"In the Shadow of a Scrivener's Quill"
"Colloquy with St. Mary of Egypt"
"The Air"
"An Ordinary Evening in San Francisco"
"The Second Year"
"On the Hills of Perusia"
"Marriage"
"Old Tyme with a Y"
Five poems

Derek Mong's Website.

Derek Mong on Twitter.

About The Ego and the Empiricist:

""Whatever I take from this forest floor," writes Derek Mong in this gorgeous new chapbook, "I borrow." And, true to this statement, Mong adeptly gathers a wide swath of source material and produces poems that honor their origins, spring off from them, and, ultimately, give back. As Mong explores the journey of the body over time, his lines are both charged and solemn, with turns of phrase at once unpredictable and spot-on. This is a haunting, riveting collection."
—Natalie Shapero

"A reader can open any contemporary journal of poetry and quickly pick up characteristics of the current mode. If the magazine is serious you'll also find good poems, and many more bad ones, and what falls between—the largest group. In this our age is like any other. Derek Mong's The Ego and the Empiricist, though its music is very much of our moment, takes as starting point poems and poets distant in time and worldview, and from first poem to last the difference is stunning. Mong has made of original medieval and renaissance works a grouping of wholly transformed new poems that sound contemporary, but retain the urgent intimacy of un-ironic spiritual 'exercises,' as the Jesuits might have it. As I read I began to think of these poems as a new species of retablos, with verbal objects in the place of iconic imagery. There is the same naïve, unmediated closeness of address to Christ—'You're smoke, you're/ thunder's anti-static rope,' the same heuristic feel to the pieces, as if intentionally made for devotional purposes. How strange! Not since Lowell's Imitations ( which Mong acknowledges in his notes) have we had a grouping of poems so alien in tone and tilt to the current secular mind brought into contemporary American idiom, fully alive, fully human. And human they are; these are not the words of the elevated or pious: 'Still, I can't explain my fear/ of flies, nor the time I beat a man for smiling.' There is everywhere an offhand grace, 'Later a green glow, like the inside of a swept cape,/ hung where the sun crossed the bay,' coupled always with the modesty of a true religious—'I am still building a theory for just what that means.' I can hardly say how much I like these poems, which are shocking for all the unusual reasons."
—Jeffrey Skinner

"A poetry of transformation, The Ego and the Empiricist blurs the space between translation and homage, and shapes a free-ranging and symphonic landscape populated by monks, farmers, philosophers, bees, and all manner of amazements. In making lost voices come alive again, Derek Mong demonstrates the poet's most profound skill: the gift of speaking in tongues."
—Ann Townsend