Abductions and The Flood: Poetry by Chiwan Choi

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LA-based poet Chiwan Choi will read from and discuss his new poetry collection, Abductions, and also from his debut collection, The Flood.

In Abductions, Choi sets out to write poems about aliens. According to Choi, it seemed like the hot thing to do, with zombie poems and such being published. What he ends up with is a mythology about alien abduction that helps tells the story of his family, including parents who escaped North Korea when they were young, and the miscarriage that he and wife went through.

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Choi will discuss the creative process between the two very different poetry collections, and the battles he went through in trying to define the personal/political (The Flood) and myth/fact (Abductions), as well as the opinions he has faced being a fringe member of the literary world, not fully embraced by the mainstream, and yet also not being Korean/Asian enough for the Korean-American/Asian-American community.

Author Bio

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Chiwan Choi is a writer, editor, teacher, and publisher. He has been a member of the Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective since 1989. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including ONTHEBUS, Esquire, Chiron Review, and CIRCA. Chiwan’s first major collection of poetry, The Flood, was published by Tía Chucha Press in April, 2010.

His students and clients have had various works published in the past couple of years, including the bestseller, Upper Cut, by Carrie White (Atria Books).

After a two-year stint in New York, where he received an MFA in Dramatic Writing from the Tisch School at NYU, Chiwan returned to Los Angeles where he and his wife, Judeth Oden, launched a new publishing company to feature Los Angeles writers, Writ Large Press, in March 2008.

Chiwan's new poetry collection, Abductions, is due out at the end of February 2012 and he is also finishing up Exit to Hope Street, a collection of short stories.