About

Mary-Kim Arnold is a poet, writer, and artist.

Her poetry collection, The Fish & The Dove, is out now from Noemi Press. The Fish & The Dove received a starred Publishers Weekly review and was the March 2020 Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection.

Litany for the Long Moment, her book-length experimental memoir about the failed search for her Korean birth mother, was selected by Carla Harryman for the 2016 Essay Press Prize and published in 2018. Litany for the Long Moment was a nominee for the 2019 Krause Essay Prize, and has been honored by the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association, named a “Best of 2018” Book by Entropy Magazine, included in NPR’s Code Switch 2018 Book Guide, was a March 2018 Rumpus Book Club selection, and was a finalist for the 2018 Chautauqua Janus Prize for Formal and Aesthetic Innovation.

Other writings have appeared in Hyperallergic, Conjunctions, The Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Mary-Kim graduated with Honors from Brown University with a B.A. in English and American Literature. She went on to earn an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown in Fiction. After more than a decade working in nonprofit administration, most notably as the Executive Director of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, she attended the Vermont College of Fine Arts and graduated with an MFA in Poetry. She now teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown and in The Newport MFA, a low-residency graduate program at Salve Regina University.

She is the recipient of a 2020 Howard Foundation Fellowship, the 2018 MacColl Johnson Fellowship, and the 2017 Fellowship in Fiction from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She serves as Senior Editor for Collaborative & Cross-Disciplinary Texts at Tupelo Quarterly.

Adopted from Korea and raised in New York, Mary-Kim lives in Rhode Island with her husband and children.