Derek Mong came to Wabash College from Portland, Oregon in the fall of 2016 to become the Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of English. He teaches courses in creative writing, poetry, American Literature, and various all-college courses, including his Freshman Tutorial: The American Road Trip. He recently developed a survey on comics and graphic novels as well as two seminars: "Literature & Photography" and "Emily Dickinson & Lyric Theory." He advises the college’s literary magazine, the Wabash Review, and can often be spotted attending campus events with his wife and young son.
As a poet, Mong is the author of two collections from Saturnalia Books—Other Romes (2011) and The Identity Thief (2018)—and a chapbook, The Ego and the Empiricist (Two Sylvias Press, 2017). As a critic, he reviews new work for the Gettysburg Review and blogs at the Kenyon Review Online. His collaborative translations of the Russian poet Maxim Amelin—made with his wife, the translator, Anne O. Fisher—have appeared widely, receiving a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2010. Their manuscript, The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelinwon the 2018 Cliff Becker Translation Prize and appeared with White Pine Press in the fall of 2018. His own essays and poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, The Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, the Southern Review, and many other publications.
His research interests include the American Renaissance, Translation Studies, photography, and American poetry from the 19th-21st centuries. He wrote his dissertation on marriage in the lives and afterlives of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, focusing on such texts as Edward Weston’s photographs for an illustrated Leaves of Grass (made with Charis Wilson, his new, and soon to be ex-, wife); the poetry of same-sex weddings; Jerome Charyn’s novel The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (2010); Joyce Carol Oates’s “EDickinsonRepliluxe” (2008); and a peculiar steampunk novella, “Walt and Emily,” where the titular characters fall in love. He has published essays on Ronald Johnson’s erasure poem, Radi os (1977), and the role of male nudity in American poems.
Before Wabash, Mong taught as the Axton Poetry Fellow at the University of Louisville, the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, with the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, at SUNY-Albany, and with young writers workshops at Kenyon College and Denison University (his alma matter). Raised outside of Cleveland, he has lived in San Francisco, Massachusetts, and various Midwest states. He currently makes his home with his family in Crawfordsville.
