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, Mother Tongue Journal, Moot Point Magazine, and elsewhere. Most recently, she has been shortlisted for the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize, Lightscatter Press Prize, 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, Sundress Prose Open Reading Period, and Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize. She is a 2023 Foothill Editors’ Prize Nominee and a 2025 Periplus Fellowship 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 as 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 the 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 Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Napa Valley, Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Minnesota Northwoods, and Juniper Institute. As an educator, she teaches poetry to refugees through the RoVena nonprofit organization.
She previously worked at HarperCollins Publishers and Penguin Random House. She is based in New York.
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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 