About the Author
Ariel Joy So is a writer from Hong Kong who has also lived in Singapore and the United States. Her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Sinking City, Foothill Poetry Journal, Mother Tongue Journal, Moot Point Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a 2023 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize Finalist, a 2023 Foothill Editors’ Prize Nominee, a 2025 Periplus Finalist, a 2025 Sundress Prose Open Reading Period Semifinalist, and a 2025 42 Miles Press Poetry Award Finalist.
She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, where she was awarded the Linda Corrente Poetry Prize. She served as Site Coordinator of the Columbia Artist/Teachers program and Vice President of the Interdisciplinary Arts Council. She graduated summa cum laude from Scripps College, with a BA in English, where she was a Mellon Interdisciplinary Humanities Initiative Fellow with a grant from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She has attended the Community of Writers Poetry Program as a recipient of the Hillary Gravendyk Memorial Scholarship. She has received additional support from the Vermont Studio Center, Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and NYU’s Writers in New York. As an educator, she teaches a regular poetry course to refugees through the RoVena nonprofit organization.
She works at HarperCollins Publishers and was previously on the editorial team at Riverhead Books of Penguin Random House. She is based in New York City and Jersey City.
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“Somewhere between the lyric essay and the serial prose poem, Ariel Joy So’s manuscript, entitled My Ghost suggested deep learning of the frames of one’s own experience of trauma, growth, displaced relations, and the ineffable or inexpressible aloneness of understanding a selfhood that is coming into being. I appreciated the way this work moved from anecdote to auto theory to lyric insight in swift shifts of the gear.”
—Divya Victor, author of the PEN Open Book Award for Curb
Ariel Joy So 