Cindy Juyoung Ok won the 2023 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition for her manuscript, Ward Toward, which will be published by Yale University Press in April 2024. Winners of the series also receive one of the five writing fellowships offered at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Conn.
Series judge Rae Armantrout said Ok "is a wonderfully inventive poet with a command of her craft. She writes in many forms, some invented, but her constant impulse is to break the frame, to escape oppressive containments. She pushes constantly against the social norms that have sometimes trapped her, writing with startling frankness about mental wards, domestic abuse, and racial stereotyping.... Her impulse is to shake things up."