Photo by SONG Got, Berlin daadgalerie 2020, DMZ Colony: Exhibition of a Book
“One of our most powerful contemporary poets, whose work blends the personal with the international, performance with text, Don Mee Choi explores with ferocity and imagination the politics of language, war, history, and intimacy.” — Forrest Gander
“In her three volumes of poetry and numerous essays, she explores themes of dislocation, fractured identities, trauma, and memory, while amplifying civilian voices that have been obscured by the history and looming threat of war in her homeland.” MacArthur Foundation
Winner, National Book Award for Poetry Judges Citation: “Don Mee Choi's urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but “during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.” Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all “victims of History,” so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist.”
“In the gallery [daadgalerie, Berlin], Choi rendered DMZ’s mountainous territory as an abstract map of black “Z”s and “M”s against a foreboding backdrop of grey. On the other walls, she displayed photographs taken by her father… and six long watercolored rows of naked female figures, standing hip to hip.” Tammy E. Kim, DAAD 2020
Citation for shortlisting in the 2025 PEN Heaney Prize: “Don Mee Choi’s Mirror Nation is the last in her trilogy of works that combine poetry, documentary, photography and philosophy to create art of astonishingly radical and political potential. Choi’s father was a photographer, whose job took him to zones of conflict and unrest. In Mirror Nation Choi counterpoints the history of two divided nations, Germany and Korea, through her father’s photographs. The resulting work comments on the philosophy of history with rare lyric grandeur.”
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of the KOR-US trilogy published by Wave Books (US) and And Other Stories (UK & EU): Mirror Nation, the National Book Award winning collection DMZ Colony, and Hardly War. She is a recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Her translation of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her forthcoming book Freely Frayed is scheduled to be published in September (US) and November (UK & EU).
She was selected as one of the inaugural 2021 Royal Society of Literature International Writers and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry. Please visit Zephyr Press, Action Books and New Directions.
She has served as a translator for the International Women's Network Against Militarism (IWNAM). Please visit and learn about IWNAM's transnational work and issues that impact women, children, and the environment.
Visit her pages at Wave Books, And Other Stories, Whiting Awards, Lannan Foundation, Berliner Künstlerprogramm, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and MacArthur Foundation.
She can be reached at donmeechoi13 (at) gmail (dot) com
Due to family caregiving and work demands, she is unable to handle any requests for book blurbs or references.