Readings from Glacier Lily and Other Poems

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Poet/playwright Chungmi Kim will talk about her journey as a Korean American poet/playwright. She will read poems from her second book of poetry, Glacier Lily (Red Hen Press, 2004). Rooted in her bi-cultural experiences, her poems depict many aspects of her life in Korea and America with deep emotion and keen observation. Haunted between the two worlds, her speaker in a poem says, “They call me/a marginal being/an island/between the continents/transplanted /in this Pac Mac culture/from the land of morning calm.” Her solitary quest for wanting “home” never ends.

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Also, Kim will talk about the process of writing her play, Comfort Women, and its productions by Urban Stages in New York and Nabi Theater Company in Korea. The Japanese Imperial Forces abducted thousands of young women during World War II to be used as sex slaves, known euphemistically as “comfort women.” This play depicts the dramatic collision of past and present when a young Korean NYU student and her grandmother meet two surviving “comfort women” from Korea during the 1994 UN protests.

Author Bio

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Chungmi Kim, a Korean-American poet and playwright, is the author of poetry books, Glacier Lily (2004) and Chungmi—Selected Poems (1982), and also a screenplay, The Dandelion, which received the first place Open Door Writing Award from the Writers Guild Foundation, West. Her poetry has been included in numerous anthologies and featured on Garrison Keillor’s National Pubic Radio program The Writer’s Almanac and in Poetry Society of America’s “Poetry In Motion” program in Los Angeles. Ms. Kim received an Emmy nomination as co-producer of “Korea: The New Power in the Pacific,” a documentary for KCBS-TV. Her play, Comfort Women, was produced at Urban Stages in New York and consequently published in New Playwrights The Best Plays of 2005 by Smith and Kraus. Its translated version in Korean, Nabi/Comfort Women, was produced at the Seoul Theatre Festival in Korea and also in Vancouver and Toronto in Canada with English and Chinese subtitles. Ms. Kim is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America.