​About the Event

​Come meet the poetry of four contemporary South Korean poets (and the poets) in this bilingual reading and party to celebrate four recent publications in translation.

​Join iconic South Korean poets Oh Eun, Yoo Heekyung, and Lee Jenny, alongside literary translator and poet Stine An, and friends for an evening of readings, experimental performances, followed by a lively conversation on Korean poetry culture and book signing.

​Meet the poets

​Oh Eun is known as the much beloved enfant terrible of South Korean poetry. “Characterized by genius wordplay, Oh Eun’s poems play with homophones and homonyms while keeping the wit, criticalness, and beauty we associate with Korean poetry.” He will be reading from From Being to Being (Black Ocean, 2025), translated by Shyun Ahn.

​ Yoo Heekyung is well known for revealing the strangeness of the world through the unfamiliar sensations found in our daily lives. Yoo’s poetry are songs about death and memory; volition and the unfixed; loneliness and loss—human conditions that cannot mix but are not opposed to each other. He will be reading from Today’s Morning Vocabulary (Zephyr Press, 2025) and Winter Night Rabbit Worries (Ugly Duckling Press, 2026) with translator Stine An.

​ Lee Jenny has pushed Korean poetry to new horizons by shaping waves of language into poetic, auditory rhythms that go beyond meaning. Lee’s poetry deconstructs conventional grammar and syntax to expand our universal notions of language. She will be reading from PIROWA PADOWA (Saturnalia Books, 2025), translated by Archana Madhavan.

​Poet Bio

​Yoo Heekyung is an acclaimed South Korean poet, playwright, and essayist. He is the author of over ten collections of poetry and prose, including Today’s Morning Vocabulary (Moonji Books, 2011), Winter Night Rabbit Worries (Hyundae Munhak, 2023), and Photography and Poetry (Achimdal Books, 2024). Yoo studied creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and playwriting at the Korea National University of Arts, and debuted as a poet in 2008 when his poem won the Chosun Ilbo’s spring literary contest. A recipient of Today’s Young Artist Award from the South Korean Ministry of Culture (2023), Hyundae Munhak Literary Award (2020), and the Gosan New Writer Award (2019), Yoo lives in Seoul where he runs the poetry bookshop and project space Wit N Cynical.

​Lee Jenny is a South Korean poet and writer, born in Busan in 1972. In 2008, she made her literary debut with the poem “Peru” which won the Kyunghyang Daily News New Writer’s Award. She has since published four poetry collections: Maybe Africa (2010), As We Don’t Know Us (2014), The Things That Were Thus Scribbled (2019), The Sentences That Aren’t Even There are Beautiful (2019), Eternity Looks Back at the Future (2026), and an essay collection Dawn and Music (2024). She was the recipient of the Kim Hyun Literary Prize in 2016 and the Hyundae Munhak Award in 2022.

​Oh Eun was born in Jeongeup, Jeollabuk-do in 1982. He graduated from the Department of Sociology at Seoul National University and received a master's degree from the Graduate School of Culture Technology at KAIST. He began his poetic career in the pages of Modern Poetry in 2002. His work includes the poetry collections The Pigs at Hotel Tassel, We Love Ambience, Something from Something, The Left Hand’s Feelings are Hurt, I Had a Name, The Pronoun for Nothingness, the young adult poetry collection Matters of the Heart, and the essay collections You, I, and Yellow, Patting, Wearing Green, Why Not, People Who Only Become Kin at Night. He has won the Park In-hwan Literary Award, Gu Sang Poetry Award, Modern Poetry Award, Poet's Notebook Award and Daesan Literary Award. He belongs to the poetry collective Jangnan(作亂).

​Stine An is a poet, literary translator, and performer in New York City. Her work has appeared in Best Literary Translations, Best American Experimental Writing, Poem-a-Day, Words Without Borders, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Literature from Harvard College and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and is the recipient of fellowships and grants from The Poetry Project, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, Yaddo, ALTA, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her publications include Today's Morning Vocabulary (Zephyr Press, 2025) and Winter Night Rabbit Worries (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2026) by Yoo Heekyung, and S_MMER CR_SH (Sarabande Books, 2025). Their debut poetry collection, B-Dragon Suite, is a winner of the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize.