Bunkong Tuon is a writer, critic, and associate professor of English at Union College, in Schenectady, NY. His criticism on Southeast Asian American literature has been published in Comparative Literature Studies, MELUS, Mosaic, Children's Literature Quarterly, among others. His poetry has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Chiron Review, Consequence, Poetry Quarterly, The Mekong Review, Numéro Cinq, and others. He is a contributor to Cultural Weekly. GRUEL, his first poetry collection, was published in 2015 (NYQ Books) and AND SO I WAS BLESSED is his latest book (NYQ Books, 2017).