Awar Monytwic Biong
Artist-in-Residence
Awar Monytwic Biong (she/her) is an essayist, poet, and fiction writer whose writing draws from her experiences as a refugee from Sudan, a naturalized American, and a daughter of the newest nation, South Sudan. She explores the isolation, interiority, and resilience of immigrant life within new country folkways. As is with her global health scholarship, Awar’s creative work relies on a supranational approach to make sense of health, society, and variation. She received a BA in Biology from the University of Virginia in 2019 and an MSc in Global Health Delivery from the University of Global Health Equity in 2024.
Awar is the Fall 2025 Artist-in-Residence. During her residency, Awar will commit herself to the experience and practice of grief to amplify and communicate the emotional process of displacement either from death or nationhood, a process that refugees often experience in isolation from those they exist in community with. She is interested in exploring the curious and incurious natures of little grief and big grief. Why is it that people slow down when driving past a car accident, but scroll past a news clip about Gaza? Awar will rely on oral history to assist her essay writing and poetry to weave together a novella-length narrative about her own little, or personal, and big griefs–that of the death of her grandfather and the desolation of her ancestral land.
