Introduction
Muriel Leung is an American writer. Her work includes the poetry collection Bone Confetti, which won the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. She has received multiple writing fellowships, and her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Early life
Leung grew up in Richmond Hills, New York. Her first language is Cantonese. She learned English in elementary school. On her mother's side, she has family members who were garment workers on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Her father emigrated to the United States from Hong Kong under refugee status, and went on to own a restaurant. She received her undergraduate degree from Sarah Lawrence College.
Career
While working on her MFA at Louisiana State University, Leung completed her poetry collection Bone Confetti, which won the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. Noemi Press published Bone Confetti the following year. The collection, which is divided into four sections, contemplates grief, loss, trauma and queerness. The book discusses the death of Leung's father, who died of stage 4 pancreatic cancer. The book also plays with the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.
Also in 2016, Fairy Tale Review nominated her poem "How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnamable Disaster" for a Pushcart Prize.
In a review of her poem "I was a house / I was a witch " for the Ploughshares blog, John Rufo said that the poem "functions to present intermingling transformations that perform whatever an opposite of distillation forecloses".
Leung's work often addresses identity.
She is a co-host of the Blood-Jet Writing Hour poetry podcast along with American Book Award winner Rachelle Cruz.
Leung received fellowships from Kundiman and Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation.
She is a co-editor at Apogee Journal and a contributing editor at Bettering American Poetry. She served as Assistant Editor of New Delta Review.
Personal life
Leung identifies as "a queer Asian-American woman". She is a doctoral student in Creative Writing at USC and resides in Los Angeles.