Don Mee Choi

Poet & translator

The KoreanAmerican poet and translator explores the “conjoined” histories of her nations using images, graphic notation and verbatim interviews. Her 2020 collection DMZ Colony, named for the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, literally deconstructs words and letters into their constituent lines in a way that recalls her fragmented homeland. She became a MacArthur fellow in 2021, with the committee judging that she has borne “witness to the effects of military violence and US imperialism on the civilians of the Korean peninsula.” Speaking of the young girl she once was in South Korea, she says: “I still converse with her in my poetry.”