UTOPIA, INC.
UTOPIA, INC.
Suji Kwock Kim
Suji Kwock Kim
Suji’s parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were all born in what’s now North Korea, where her grandfather, aunt, uncle and cousins still live. When civil war broke out, her parents were children, and they, along with hundreds of thousands of others, migrated on foot to what’s now South Korea. Although the Korean War is often called “The Forgotten War” in the U.S., it’s worth remembering that estimates range from 3-5 million deaths in just three years, 1950-1953, Northern and Southern, civilian and military, Chinese/Soviet-bloc and U.S./U.N.-ally, in a country the size of Michigan.
Like many Asians, her parents never heard the word “chink” until they set foot in America. They spent their life-savings on the immigration process itself, so they had no money to pay for health insurance during her mother’s pregnancies. Still, Suji got lucky, and was born without medical complications. But her mother’s doctors dismissed her complaints about painful post-partum bleeding, in broken English, without examining her carefully enough, and when she became pregnant again, prescribed medicine suspected of causing disabilities in unborn children. Suji’s younger brother and sister were both born severely disabled, mentally and physically. Both also tested as genetically non-disabled, or “normal.” In retrospect, it’s clear their disabilities were developmental, not genetic, and could have been prevented, if immigrant poverty and a dysfunctional American health-care system had not forced her mother to accept the incompetent doctors she had been given.
UTOPIA, INC. is a hybrid work incorporating poetry, memoir, lyric essay, visual and auditory materials, investigating questions of nation and narration, surveillance and autocracy, memory and postmemory: how wars are remembered and forgotten; how the language of empire and propaganda plays in counterpoint with the languages of revolution, resistance, reportage; how traditional race and gender roles are dismantled or reinscribed; how violence is represented or mystified; and how cycles of violence can be broken in familial or national history. It interweaves text with photographs, drawings, paintings, propaganda posters, newspaper clippings, street-signs, maps, letters from and visas to countries that no longer exist. It articulates multiple silences within each silence, incorporating archival and digital materials, folk songs, lullabies, riddles, A.I. bots, with the aim of discovering new possibilities for intertextual and interdisciplinary play, new ways of creating polyphonic voices, and ultimately, embracing a more inclusive spectrum of human — even posthuman — experience.
Literature, Poetry
2026
About Suji Kwock Kim
Princeton, NJ
Suji is author of NOTES FROM THE DIVIDED COUNTRY, which won the Whiting Writers’ Award, Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Bay Area Book Reviewers/Northern California Book Award, and was a finalist for the Griffin Prize; PRIVATE PROPERTY, a multimedia play performed at Playwrights Horizons and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; NOTES FROM THE NORTH, which won the UK’s International Book and Pamphlet Award; and DISORIENT: FUGUES & ASSIMILAMENTATIONS, which is in-progress. Selections from DISORIENT received 3 awards from the Poetry Society of America, appearing in AMERICAN RELIGIOUS POEMS (Library of America), AMERICAN WAR POETRY (Columbia UP), BEST AMERICAN POETRY (Scribner), CROSSING STATE LINES (FSG), THE FUTURE DICTIONARY OF AMERICA (McSweeney’s), THE KOREAS (Routledge), BBC, THE GUARDIAN, IRISH EXAMINER, LOS ANGELES TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST and elsewhere. Her work has been performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus at Pablo Casals Hall, Chorusorganisation, Koreanische Frauengruppe, Japanische Fraueninitiative in Berlin, Solera Quartet at the Art Institute of Chicago, recorded for the BBC, Library of Congress, NPR, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Free Genoa and Amsterdam, and translated into German, Italian, Croatian, Korean, Japanese, Bengali and Arabic.
Suji is author of NOTES FROM THE DIVIDED COUNTRY, which won the Whiting Writers’ Award, Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Bay Area Book Reviewers/Northern California Book Award, and was a finalist for the Griffin Prize; PRIVATE PROPERTY, a multimedia play performed at Playwrights Horizons and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; NOTES FROM THE NORTH, which won the UK’s International Book and Pamphlet Award; and DISORIENT: FUGUES & ASSIMILAMENTATIONS, which is in-progress. Selections from DISORIENT received 3 awards from the Poetry Society of America, appearing in AMERICAN RELIGIOUS POEMS (Library of America), AMERICAN WAR POETRY (Columbia UP), BEST AMERICAN POETRY (Scribner), CROSSING STATE LINES (FSG), THE FUTURE DICTIONARY OF AMERICA (McSweeney’s), THE KOREAS (Routledge), BBC, THE GUARDIAN, IRISH EXAMINER, LOS ANGELES TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST and elsewhere. Her work has been performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus at Pablo Casals Hall, Chorusorganisation, Koreanische Frauengruppe, Japanische Fraueninitiative in Berlin, Solera Quartet at the Art Institute of Chicago, recorded for the BBC, Library of Congress, NPR, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Free Genoa and Amsterdam, and translated into German, Italian, Croatian, Korean, Japanese, Bengali and Arabic.