Ron Offen Poetry Prize Reading by Erika L. Sánchez and Michael Sun

January 24, 2023 6:00PM
Logan Center, Room 801
photo of erika sanchez

Established in memory of poet and editor Ron Offen, the Ron Offen Poetry Prize brings one Chicago poet to campus each year for a public reading. The prize also accommodates one student reader, to be chosen by the visiting poet from anonymous submissions.

Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in July 2017, and was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. Her debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, published in October 2017 by Knopf Books for Young Readers, was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Awards finalist. It is now is being made into a film directed by America Ferrera. Most recently Sánchez published a critically acclaimed memoir-in-essays titled Crying in the Bathroom with Viking Books. Sánchez was a Fulbright Scholar, a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent fellow from the Poetry Foundation, a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2018 recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and a 2019 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz chair at DePaul University in Chicago.

 

Michael Sun

Michael Sun is a Korean American poet from the suburbs of Chicago. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in English and Creative Writing, and currently is in his fourth-year of medical school at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. Michael’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Honey Literary, HAD, and Moist Poetry.