Moon Country Korean Poetry featuring Hedgie Choi, Spencer Lee-Lenfield, Shin Hae-uk, Mattho Mandersloot, and Janaka Stucky

and cultural context across languages. Through readings and discussion, the participants will offer a glimpse into the choices, discoveries, and productive tensions that shape poetry in translation. The evening will be moderated by Black Ocean founder and publisher Janaka Stucky. The suggested donation for this event is $10. All donations benefit Poets House. You will be able to choose your contribution amount when you RSVP online or at the door. All are welcome; no one will be turned away for lack of funds. By attending or participating in this program, you agree to abide by our Community Agreement. Events at Poets House are popular, and seating is first-come, first-seated. We have several seats reserved for people with access needs. If events reach capacity, seating will be available in an overflow viewing room. About the Poets: Hedgie Choi received her MFA in poetry from The Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin and her MFA in fiction from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. She is the cotranslator of Hysteria by Kim Yi Deum and the translator of Pillar of Books by Moon Bo Young. She is the author of Salvage. Spencer Lee-Lenfield is a translator and scholar of Korean literature and an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he teaches translation studies and researches Korean-English literary translation. His translation of Shin Hae-uk’s Biologicity, published by Black Ocean, was nominated for the 2025 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. His translations and writing have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, New England Review, The Yale Review, and The New York Review of Books. Shin Hae-uk is the author of three poetry books in Korean in addition to essay collections and a novel. She won Korea’s Author’s Choice Emerging Poet Award in 2010 and received the Kim Hyun Literary Prize in 2022. She holds a doctorate in Korean literature from Korea University and currently teaches creative writing at Dongduk Women’s University in Seoul. Mattho Mandersloot is a literary translator working from Korean into English and Dutch. A former taekwondo athlete, he earned a BA in classics from King’s College London, an MA in translation from the School of Oriental and African Studies and an MSt in Korean studies from Oxford. Among others, he has translated bestselling authors Cho Nam-joo and Sang Young Park. He has led several poetry translation workshops at the Poetry Translation Centre in London, and in 2020, he was awarded The Korea Times’ 51st Modern Korean Literature Translation Award for poetry. Janaka Stucky is a poet, editor, and the founder and publisher of Black Ocean, an independent nonprofit press dedicated to poetry, translation, and formally adventurous literature. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Ascend Ascend and The Truth Is We Are Perfect, and is currently editing a forthcoming anthology of funeral poems for Copper Canyon Press. Through Black Ocean, he publishes the Moon Country Korean Poetry series, bringing contemporary Korean poetry into English translation.