Photo by SONG Got, Berlin daadgalerie 2020, DMZ Colony: Exhibition of a Book
“In her three volumes of poetry and numerous essays, she explores themes of dislocation, fractured identities, trauma, and memory, while amplifying civilian voices that have been obscured by the history and looming threat of war in her homeland.” MacArthur Foundation
“Don Mee Choi’s writing, slides between forms: memoir, libretto, list, diary, visual poetry, essay. Hardly War is a hybrid text about all the violent conflicts her father saw as a war-photographer and includes pictures he took.” DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program
Winner, National Book Award for Poetry Judges Citation: “Don Mee Choi's urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but “during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.” Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all “victims of History,” so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist.”
“Choi’s poetry is not bilingual but multilingual and increasingly multimedia, built of photography, film, drawings, handwritten letters, collage, and typographic play.” Tammy E. Kim, Poetry Foundation
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of the KOR-US trilogy: Mirror Nation (Wave Books, 2024), the National Book Award winning collection DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), and Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016). She is a recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Her translation of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry collection, Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize. And most recently, her translation of Phantom Pain Wings (New Directions, 2023) won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
She was selected as one of the inaugural 2021 Royal Society of Literature International Writers.
She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry. Please visit Zephyr Press, Action Books and New Directions.
She has served as a translator for the International Women's Network Against Militarism (IWNAM). Please visit and learn about IWNAM's transnational work and issues that impact women, children, and the environment.
Visit her pages at Wave Books, Whiting Awards, Lannan Foundation, Berliner Künstlerprogramm, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and MacArthur Foundation.
She can be reached at donmeechoi13 (at) gmail (dot) com
Due to family and work demands, she is unable to handle any requests for book blurbs..