Don Mee Choi was born and grew up in Seoul and Hong Kong, and now lives in Seattle. She has translated five books of poetry by Kim Hyesoon: Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (2008), All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011) and Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014) from Action Books in the US; I’m OK, I’m Pig! from Bloodaxe Books (2014) in the UK; and most recently, Autobiography of Death (New Directions, USA, 2018), winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2019, and Phantom Pain Wings (And Other Stories, 2024). Her anthology Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women was published by Zephyr Press in the US in 2006, and her own collection The Morning News is Exciting by Action Books in 2010. She has received a 2011 Whiting Writers Award and the 2012 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize as well as a Daesan Translation Grant, Korea Literature Translation Institute Translation Grant and an American Literary Translators Association Travel Fellowship. She has served as poet-in-residence at the Henry Art Gallery, and holds a BFA and an MFA from the California Institute for the Arts and a PhD in Modern Korean Literature and Translation from Union Institute and University.
