The MFA Program in Creative Writing of the California Institute of the Arts is thrilled to present Don Mee Choi, 2024’s Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence. Choi (pronounced Che) is a markedly influential figure in contemporary experimental poetry combining the visual, the documentary and the lyrical in her highly acclaimed books. Her Kor-Us Trilogy (Hardly War, DMZ Colony and the forthcoming Mirror Nation) intertwines the author’s family history with the troubled and complex modern history of South Korea and its long entanglement with the imperial power and ambitions of the United States of America. For her work Choi has already received some of the highest honors a literary artist can achieve—the National Book Award for 2020’s DMZ Colony and a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of her work in poetry and in the field of translation, where she’s brought so many English readers for the first time to the pages of some of the most innovative poets working in South Korea today, notably the influential feminist poet Kim Heysoon.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of the National Book Award–winning collection DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and several pamphlets of poems and essays. She is a recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry, including Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize. As the MacArthur Foundation wrote in awarding Che its fellowship in 2021:”Choi’s intertwined practices as poet and translator bear witness to otherwise unspeakable histories and expand the range of expressive possibilities for writers from diasporic and multilingual backgrounds.”