Suji Kwock Kim
Suji Kwock Kim was educated at Yale University, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Seoul National University and Yonsei University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow.
Kim is the author of Notes from the North (Smith/Doorstop, 2022), winner of the International Book & Pamphlet Competition (chosen by Neil Astley, Michael Schmidt, and Amy Wack), and Notes from the Divided Country (Louisiana State University Press, 2003), which received the 2002 Walt Whitman Award (chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa), the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (chosen by Charles Simic), the Bay Area Book Reviewers/Northern California Book Award and The Nation/Discovery Award, in addition to being a finalist for the Griffin International Prize. Kim has also written Private Property, a multimedia play performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Her work has been translated into Arabic, Bengali, Croatian, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish.
Additionally, Kim’s work has been performed at numerous venues globally, including Pablo Casals Hall in Tokyo and the Art Institute of Chicago. She serves as a trustee for Connect: North Korea, formerly the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea, based in New Malden, Surrey, home to the largest community of North Koreans in the world outside of Asia.
Daljit Nagra, chair of the Royal Society of Literature, recently broadcast Kim’s work on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Extra. He writes, “[Suji Kwock Kim’s] Whitmanesque lines convey the brutality and the pathos of not just the Korean War, but of conflict in general.”
Kim is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Foundation, the Association of Asian Studies-Northeast Asia Council, the Korea Foundation, the Blakemore Foundation, Wordsworth Trust, New York Foundation for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the Washington State Artist Trust, and Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as Poetry London, the Munster Literature Centre (Ireland), and three awards from the Poetry Society of America.
