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Notes on Contributors
✳AZALEA generally adheres to the McCune-Reischauer system in transcribing Korean into English. However, several Korean contributors have not followed this convention, and we respect their way of writing their names in English.
Brother Anthony of Taizé (An Sonjae) has published about forty volumes of English translations of Korean literature, mostly poetry. Born in Cornwall in 1942, he studied medieval and modern languages at Oxford, and, in 1969, joined the Taizé Community in France. Since 1980, he has lived in Korea, teaching English literature at Sogang University and translating a wide variety of Korean literary works. In 1994, Brother Anthony became a naturalized Korean citizen, taking on the Korean name, An Sonjae. He has received various awards for translation, including the Republic of Korea Literary Award. He is presently Emeritus Professor at Sogang University in Seoul, and President of the Royal Asiatic Society, Korean Branch.
Benoit Berthelier is Lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Sydney. His research interests include Korean literary history, technoculture, digital humanities, and computing history.
Cho Kang-sŏk is a literary critic and Associate Professor of Korean Language and Literature at Yonsei University, Korea. He has published several books on Korean literature and culture, such as Constellation of Aporia (2008), Empiricist's Watch (2010), Two Aspects of Dissonant Aesthetic Appearance (2011), Image Motiphology (2014), and Korean Literature and Universalism (2017). A winner of the Hyundae Munhak Award for Critics (2020), he taught Korean Literature at Inha University from 2011 to 2017. Since March 2018, he has been teaching Korean Contemporary Literature at Yonsei University.
Choi Jeongrye was born in a city near Seoul. She studied Korean poetry at Korea University and received her PhD from the same school. She has published nine poetry/essay books, including Tigers in the Sunlight (1998), Lebanese Emotions (2006), and Kangaroo Is Kangaroo I Am I (2011), and has received several awards from the Korean Poetry Society. She participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2006, and stayed one year at the University of California, Berkeley, as a visiting writer in 2009. Her poems have appeared in venues such as Free Verse, Iowa Review, Text Journal, and World Literature Today. An English-language collection, Instances: Selected Poems (which she co-translated with Wayne de Fremery and Brenda Hillman), has been published. In 2018, she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In 2019, she translated James Tate's Return to City of White Donkeys into Korean.
Chung Eun-Gwi was born in Kyungju, South Korea. After earning a PhD at SUNY Buffalo, she has taught modern poetry and translation in Korea. Currently, she is Professor of the Department of English Literature and Culture at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. She translates poetry into both Korean and English, and her publications include articles, translations, poems, and reviews in various journals including World Literature Today, Cordite, and Azalea. Her recent publications are Bari's Love Song (2019), Ah, Mouthless Things (2017), and Fifteen Seconds Without Sorrow (2016).
Jae Won Edward Chung is Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He is working on a monograph that looks at the era of liberation, war, and reconstruction between 1948 and 1960 in South Korea, focusing on how changing ideas of everyday life interacted with the evolving media ecology. His writing, translations, and research have appeared in Journal of Asian Studies, Boston Review, and Apogee Journal.
Sonja Haeussler is Professor of Korean Language and Culture at Stockholm University, Sweden. She studied Asian philology with a focus on Korean language and literature at Leningrad State University. Her main fields of research are pre-modern and modern Korean literature as well as DPRK cultural policy.
Han Youngsoo (1933–1999), born in Kaesŏng, currently part of North Korea, started his career as a photographer in 1958 by joining Sinsŏnhoe (The New Line Group), the first photographers' forum in Korea. His photos of street scenes and everyday life captured the vivid reality of post-war Korea. He had numerous photo exhibitions and published several photography books, including Life (1987, Sint'aeyangsa), Seoul Modern Times (2014, Hansgraphic), Once Upon a Time (2015, Hansgraphic) and Time Flows in River (2017, Hansgraphic). His works became internationally recognized following a posthumous exhibition in 2017 at the International Center of Photography, New York. His works are in the collections of various museums, including the International Center of Photography, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hungarian Museum of Photography, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Following his death in 1999, the Han Youngsoo Foundation was established to preserve his works and promote recognition of his accomplishments.
Jung Ha-yun is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Review, and other publications. Her translations include novels and stories by Oh Jung-hee, Kim Hoon, and Shin Kyung-sook. She is on the faculty of Ewha Womans University's Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation in Seoul.
Kim Hoon is the author of nine novels, one story collection, and an extensive range of non-fiction. He received the Dongin Literary Award in 2001 for his breakthrough historical novel, Song of the Sword, which was followed by many other honors, including the Daesan Literary Award. His books have been translated into French, Japanese, and Spanish.
Kim So Yeon was born in Kyungju, South Korea. She studied Korean literature at the Catholic University of Korea, where she also earned her master's degree. She has taught poetry at the Seoul Institute of the Arts, and at Korea National University of Arts, where a number of her students have gone on to become professional poets. She was a part of a literary circle called "21stcentury Outlook," and has four poetry collections: Pushed to the Limit (1996), Exhaustion of Light Pulls the Night (2006), Bones Called Tears (2009), Mathematician's Morning (2013), and To i (2018). Her essay collections, Dictionary of the Mind (2008), The World of Siot (2012), and There Is No Love in Love (2019), also gained wider recognition. Kim won the tenth Nojak Literature Prize in 2010, the fifty-seventh Hyundae Literary Award in 2011, and the twelfth Yi Yuksa Poetry Award in 2015.
Kim Yideum was born in Jinju, South Korea. She studied German literature at Pusan National University, and earned her doctoral degree in Korean literature at Gyeongsang National University. Her poetry collections include A Stain in the Shape of a Star (2005), Cheer Up, Femme Fatale (2007), Inexpressible Love (2011), Song of Dahlem, Berlin (2013), Hysteria (2014), Drifting Black Hair (2017), and Wearing a Non-Drying T-shirt (2019). She also has a novel, Blood Sisters (2011). Her poetry in translation has appeared in many magazines, including Modern Poetry in Translation. She also participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Cheer Up, Femme Fatale was selected as a finalist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award and the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. Currently, she is a professor at Hanyang Women's University, Seoul, Korea.
Koh Hyojin studied literary translation as a graduate student at Ewha Womans University and the University of Texas at Dallas. Kim Hoon's "Rivers and Mountains Without End" was the first short story she translated at Ewha. Currently, she is translating a novel about a group of people risking their lives on a rickety boat in hopes for a better future.
David Krolikoski is Assistant Professor of Korean Literature at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. His research interests include modern Korean poetry, translation studies, poetics, postcolonial theory, and transnational literature. Currently, Krolikoski is preparing his manuscript, tentatively titled Lyrical Translation: The Creation of Modern Poetic Language in Colonial Korea, for publication.
Ku In-mo is Associate Professor at the Global Leaders College of Yonsei University and specializes in modern Korean poetry and translation studies. His publications include The Ideal and Illusion in Modern Korean Poetry (Hanguk kŭndaesi ŭi isang kwa hŏsang, Seoul: Somyung Chulpan, 2008), and The Era of Gramophone, Advent of Popular Poets (Yusŏng'gi ŭi sidae, yuhaengsiin ŭi t'ansaeng, Seoul: Hyunsil Munhwa, 2013).
Jun-Youb (J.Y.) Lee is a seminarian at Harvard Divinity School. He has worked in journalism, literary translation, and chaplaincy, and has written a travel essay book in Korean. He is seeking ordination in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Ivanna Sang Een Yi is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She received her PhD in Korean Literature from Harvard University. As a scholar of Korean literature and culture, she focuses on the intersections between performance, literature, and the environment in the 20th century to the present.
