A Poetry Reading & Discussion with Suji Kwock Kim May 5, 2004

Please join us as Suji Kwock Kim reads from Notes from the Divided Country, her first book of poems, which won Discovery/The Nation Award, the 2002 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In April, Notes from the Divided Country was also named a finalist for the 2004 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the largest poetry prize in the world. Reviews in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Booklist praised it as "brilliant," "inspired," "punch-in-the-guts powerful," and "unforgettable."

Kim confronts some of the most difficult, most unanswerable questions?colonialism, the Korean War, emigration, racism, love. She considers what a homeland would be, for a divided nation and divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family, the community; to be a daughter, sister, lover, citizen, or exile. In settings from New York to San Francisco, Scotland to Seoul, her poems question, ?what threads hold/our lives together? in cities and gardens, battlefields, and small towns. Across the no-man's-land between every "you" and "I," her speakers encounter, quarrel with, or honor others, traveling between the living and the dead, between horror over the disastrous events of the past, and hope for the future.

About the Author:
Suji Kwock Kim received her B.A. from Yale University and M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She was also a Fulbright Scholar at Seoul National University in Korea and a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, SLATE, Paris Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Yale Review, and was featured on National Public Radio's ?Weekend Edition? and ?All Things Considered.?

Private Property, a play she cowrote, was produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and featured on BBC-TV. She is assistant professor of English at Drew University.

There will be a Q&A session and book signing for this program. Copies of Notes from the Divided Country will be available for purchase and autograph. Free and open to the public. RSVP suggested. Please contact Grace Chon at 212-759-7525 x301 or [email protected].