PrAISE FOR ALL EMPIRES MUST
All Empires Must is a brilliant collection of persona poems whose rigor and tautness conceals their complexity. Engaging the speculative, art and architecture, and feminist critique, Mia Kang’s countertexts on the founding of Rome shift power dynamics and imagine alternate scenarios.
—Mónica de la Torre
Tough in its lyricism, savvy in vernacular, form, and ambition, Kang’s book is unforgettable.
—Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
With rare rigor and poignancy, All Empires Must animates trenchant dilemmas about power, patriarchy, and loss.
—Maggie Millner
Photo by David McDowell.
Mia Kang is the author of All Empires Must (Airlie Press, 2025), which won the 2023 Airlie Prize, and the chapbooks Apparent Signs (Ghost City Press, 2024) and City Poems (ignitionpress, 2020). The self-appointed Poet Laureate of the Process, she lives in Philadelphia with two cats.
Mia is also the Executive Director of the Philadelphia Folklore Project. She holds a PhD in the history of art from Yale University, and she has taught at Hunter College, the Cooper Union, University of the Arts, and Yale College. Her academic publications include contributions to Roxy Paine: The Dioramas (Skira, 2021), The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop (Skira, 2019), Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (Yale University Press, 2020), Published by Lugemik: Printed Matter from 2010-2019 (Lugemik, 2019), and Plot magazine.