Monica Ong

Discipline: Poetry

Based In: Trumbull, CT

Year at Millay: 2016

Awards/Honors: United States Artists Fellowship (2024); Sylvia Clare Brown Fellowship, Ragdale Foundation (2023); Poetry Award Winner, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Money for Women Grant (2023); Gordon Eads & Jeanne Fee Feeney Residency Award, Marble House Project, Dorset, VT (2022); Editor’s Prize in Hybrid Work, "Bat City Review" (2022); Semi-finalist, Adrienne Rich Award, "Beloit Poetry Journal" (2021); 2nd Place, Voices of Color Fellowship, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Aquinnah, MA (2021); Sustainable Arts Foundation (2021); Artist Fellowship Award, Connecticut Office of the Arts, Hartford, CT (2021); Winner of the 2020 New Alchemy Contest, "Permafrost Magazine" (2020); Pushcart Nomination, "A Velvet Giant" (2020); Finalist, Peseroff Prize Poetry Award, "Breakwater Review" (2020); 2nd Place, Blurred Genres Poetry Award, "Redivider" (2020); Matched Savings Grant, MassMoCA & Assets for Artists (2019); Regional Initiative Grant, Connecticut Office of the Arts, Hartford, CT (2018); Full-tuition Scholarship, Fine Art Works Center, Provincetown, MA (2017); Kore Press First Book Award in Poetry (2014).

Website: https://www.monicaong.com/

Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press, 2015). A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong brings a designer’s eye to experimental writing with her hybrid image-poems and installations that surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. Her poetry can be found in Scientific American, ctrl+v, and Poetry Magazine, and in the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions, 2024).

Ong’s most recent series of astronomy-inspired visual poetry was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and is the basis of her new book Planetaria (Proxima Vera, 2025). You can find her fine press visual poetry editions and literary art objects in over fifty distinguished institutional collections worldwide. In 2024, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow.