Don Mee Choi (; born 1962) 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 (chapbook) Freely Frayed,ᄏ=q, & Race=Nation, Wave Books, 2014 (chapbook) Sky Translation, Goodmorning Menagerie A Chapbook Press, n.d. (chapbook) Hardly War, Wave Books, 2016 DMZ Colony, Wave Books, 2020 Mirror Nation, Wave Books, (Publication date 4/2/24)
Translations Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers by Kim Hyesoon, Action Books, 2005 Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women, Zephyr Press, 2006 All the Garbage of the World, Unite! by Kim Hyesoon, Action Books, 2011 Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream by Kim Hyesoon, Action Books, 2014 I'm OK, I'm Pig! by Kim Hyesoon, Bloodaxe Books, 2014 Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon, Bloodaxe Books, 2018 (winner of the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize) Ahn Hak-sŏp #4 by Ahn Hak-sŏp and Don Mee Choi, The Green Violin, 2018 (chapbook) 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,
References
External links Kathleen Rooney, Hardly War,' by Don Mee Choi" (review), The New York Times, April 22, 2016. Profile at the Whiting Foundation