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.
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.