The MFA Program in Creative Writing of the California Institute of the Arts is thrilled to welcome 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.
Photo credit: Dirk Skiba