Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present…

Yi Won, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello & E.J. Koh

The poet confronts a wired, technological world, often in the mirror, in these inventive, daring and subversive poems. 

A successor to Korean feminist poets like Kim Hyesoon, Yi Won frequently writes about the perilousness of maintaining one’s human identity in a high-tech, digital environment. In this debut book in English, her poems range from avant-garde prose poems to more lyrical, if dark, free verse, as she examines isolation, death, and the passage of time — and in the process, upends polite society and Korean literary culture.

YI WON is a South Korean avant-garde poet and essayist, born in 1968 in Gyeonggi-do. She studied Creative Writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and earned her master’s degree at the Graduate School of Culture and Arts at Dongguk University. Her poetry debuted in 1992, and she received the Contemporary Poetics Award (2002), Contemporary Poetry Award (2005), Opening the World with Poetry Award (2014), The Beginning Award (2014), The Equity Literature Award (2018), and the Poet Town Literary Award (2018). Her books include When They Ruled the Earth (1996), A Thousand Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo!  (2001), The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (2007), The History of an Impossible Page (2012), Let Love be Born  (2017), and  I Am My Affectionate Zebra  (2018). She lives in Seoul, South Korea, and works at the Seoul Institute of the Arts as a professor of Creative Writing, School of Creative Writing.

MARCI CALABRETTA CANCIO-BELLO is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), which won the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Award and Florida Book Award. She is the co-translator, with E. J. Koh, of Yi Won’s poetry collection The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, Orion, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association and Kundiman, Cancio-Bello earned an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. She is co-leader for the PEN America Miami/South Florida Chapter, and is a program coordinator for the Miami Book Fair.

E. J. KOH is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others (Tin House Books, 2020), winner of the Washington State Book Award, winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), winner of the Pleiades Editors Prize for Poetry. She is the co-translator, with Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, of Yi Won’s poetry collection The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021). Koh has received fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, MacDowell, and Kundiman. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, POETRY, Slate, and elsewhere. Koh earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Creative Writing and Literary Translation. Koh is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington in English Literature studying Korean American literature, history, and film.

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The World’s Lightest Motorcycle: A Virtual Evening with Yi Won, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello & E.J. Koh