On September 26-27, EALL hosted “Thus Spoke: Kim Hyesoon, Fi Jae Lee, Jack Jung,” the inaugural iteration of the Hee Kyung Lee Kwon Speaker Series that spotlights significant voices in Korean women’s literature. The event included a bilingual poetry reading, art talk, question and answer session, book signing, as well as a translation workshop. More information can be found in the following story published by UH News.
“Thus Spoke” featured three guest speakers:
Kim Hyesoon is a poet, essayist, and critic from South Korea. She was the first woman-identifying poet to win the Midang Literature Award, which she received in 2006. Kim Hyesoon’s poetry collection Phantom Pain Wings, translated from Korean by Don Mee Choi (New Directions, 2023), was a highlighted Book of the Year by The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others. Her other collections include Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), Poor Love Machine (Action Books, 2016), I’m OK, I’m Pig! (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), and All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (Action Books, 2011). Her work has been translated into many languages, including Swedish, French, German, Polish, Persian, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Danish. In 2023, Kim Hyesoon and translator Don Mee Choi gave the T.S. Eliot Memorial Reading at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. She has received multiple literary prizes, including the Samsung Ho-Am Prize, UK Royal Society of Literature International Writer Award, Cikada Prize, Lee Hyoung-Gi Literary Award, Griffin Poetry Prize, Daesan Poetry Award, Sowol Poetry Award, and Kim Su-Yong Literary Award. She lives in Seoul.
Based in Seoul, Korea, Fi Jae Lee received her B.F.A and M.F.A at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her paintings and sculptures have been introduced in many exhibitions including sixteen solo shows, held in Korea, Japan, France and the United States. She has participated in several artist residency programs, such as Goyang Art Studio (National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, 2011), SeMA Nanji Residency (Seoul Museum of Art, 2014) and Bilbaoarte (Fundación Bilbaoarte Fundazioa Spain 2017). She also appeared as one of six artists in a reality TV show, Artstar Season 2, New York. Her work is part of the permanent collection of National Museum of Contemporary Art and Seoul Museum of Art.
Jack Jung is a poet and literary translator. He primarily translates Korean poetry into English and teaches at Davidson College. Prior to Davidson, he taught creative writing at the University of Iowa and led Korean poetry translation workshops at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. He is also a mentor for Korean poetry translation in the American Literary Translation Association’s emerging translator program. His translations of poetry and prose by a major Korean modernist poet Yi Sang (1910-1937) is published in Yi Sang: Selected Works, edited by Don Mee Choi (Wave Books 2020).
Hee Kyung Lee Kwon Speaker Series
This speaker series is dedicated to the celebration of Korean women’s literature and culture. Organized by the department of East Asian Languages & Literatures, it features individuals who have made a significant contribution to the field as authors, artists, translators, scholars, etc. The series was made possible thanks to the generous contribution of Esther Arinaga to commemorate her mother, Hee Kyung Lee Kwon. Hee Kyung Lee Kwon was born in Daegu in 1894 and emigrated to Hawai‘i in 1912, where she supported the Korean Independence Movement abroad from 1915 to 1945.
