Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of DMZ Colony, Hardly War, The Morning News Is Exciting, and several chapbooks and pamphlets of poems and essays. She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship. More about this author >
From the publisher:
Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said’s notion of “the intertwined and overlapping histories” in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.
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.
