Don Mee Choi

Don Mee Choi is a Korean-American poet and translator.

Life

Don Mee Choi was born in Seoul, South Korea, educated in the United States, and now lives in Berlin, Germany. Choi's works of documentary poetry draw on family history as well as archival material to interrogate "the overlapping histories of Korea and the U.S." In addition to her own poetry, she is a prolific translator of modern Korean women poets, including several books by Kim Hyesoon.

Awards

2011: Whiting Award
2012: Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize for All the Garbage of the World, Unite! by Kim Hyesoon
2016: Lannan Literary Fellowship Award
2019: Griffin Poetry Prize Award for translation of Autobiography of Death from the Korean written by Kim Hyesoon
2020: National Book Award for Poetry for DMZ Colony
2021: Guggenheim Fellowship Poetry
2021: MacArthur Fellows Program
2021: Royal Society of Literature International Writer
2025: shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize for ''Mirror Nation''

Works

Books

The Morning News is Exciting, Action Books, 2010, Petite Manifesto, Vagabond Press, 2014 Freely Frayed,ᄏ=q, & Race=Nation, Wave Books, 2014 Sky Translation, Goodmorning Menagerie A Chapbook Press, n.d. Hardly War, Wave Books, 2016DMZ Colony, Wave Books, 2020Mirror Nation, Wave Books,

Translations

Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers by Kim Hyesoon, Action Books, 2005Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women, Zephyr Press, 2006All the Garbage of the World, Unite! by Kim Hyesoon, Action Books, 2011Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream by Kim Hyesoon, Action Books, 2014I'm OK, I'm Pig! by Kim Hyesoon, Bloodaxe Books, 2014Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon, Bloodaxe Books, 2018 Ahn Hak-sŏp #4 by Ahn Hak-sŏp and Don Mee Choi, The Green Violin, 2018 Yi Sang: Selected Works by Yi Sang, ed. Don Mee Choi, Wave Books, 2020

Anthology

Yasuhiro Yotsumoto Ming Di Don Mee Choi, Shuntaro Tanikawa, Hyesoon Kim, Trilingual Renshi, Vagabond Press, 2015,