Don Mee Choi in conversation with Uljana Wolf and Sung Un Gang
Born in South Korea, Don Mee Choi incorporates in her poetry photos by her father, a war photographer, and other visual and archival materials in order to explore the overlapping histories of Korea and the US. She is a renowned translator of Korean poetry and has taken over the Picador Guest Professorship for Literature at the University of Leipzig in the winter semester of 2021/22.
Don Mee Choi will talk about being a Picador Guest Professor in Leipzig, her book »DMZ Colony« (Wave Books, 2020) and the art of translating lyrics with poet and translator Uljana Wolf and host Sung Un Gang.
Uljana Wolf teaches seminars on poetry and translation at Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig, Institut für Sprachkunst, and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and is currently working on a translation of Choi’s poetry collection »DMZ Colony«. Most recently, Uljana Wolf published the essay collection »Etymologischer Gossip« (Kookbooks Verlag, 2020) on poetry, translation, and multilingualism.
The evening will be moderated by Sung Un Gang, research associate in the Department of Korean Studies at the University of Bonn and host of the podcast »Bin ich süßsauer?« that features interviews with queer Asians in Germany.
The event will be held in English and will be simultaneously interpreted into German by Lilian-Astrid Geese. In cooperation with the Literaturhaus Berlin.
We proudly present: the next Picador Professor Don Mee Choi!
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), which won the 2020 National Book Award. She has published three books and several pamphlets of poems and essays. Choi’s poetry incorporates photos by her father, a war photographer, and other visual and archival materials in order to explore the overlapping histories of Korea and the US.
Don Mee Choi in conversation with Sung Un Gang
Don Mee Choi was born in Seoul, South Korea, and is the author of “Hardly War” and “DMZ Colony”. The latter won the National Book Award in 2020. She has published three books, several pamphlets of poems and essays and translated volumes of poetry by Kim Hyesoon and Yi Sang, among others. Choi has received the 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize for her translation of Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), 2019 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship and many more. As the current Picador Guest Professor she is teaching American Studies at the University Leipzig.
The moderator and partner on stage for the event is Sung Un Gang, a research associate at the University of Bonn and a Ph. D. candidate at the University of Cologne in the field of Theater and Media Cultures . Sung Un is also hosting a poadcast, called “Bin ich süßsauer?”, about and with queer Asians. Find out more about it here.
On December 1, Don Mee Choi read from her books “Hardly War” and “DMZ Colony” and talked with Sung Un Gang at our event “War, Resistance, Poetry”.
Conversation in English. Watch the Video on YouTube.
"I was a Picador Guest Professor in Literature in Leipzig (2010/2011). The position was very fulfilling and my creative writing students were dynamic, imaginative, and full of heart. Leipzig is wondrous."
Nathalie Handal in an interview with thebartleby.com.
Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet, playwright, and writer. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. In the winter semester 2010/11, Handal held the Picador Professorship at the University of Leipzig. Her latest book Life in a Country Album was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
