I call myself a writer, artist, educator, and administrator, but most of my work exists at the intersection of these roles. I’ve written and published two books: The Fish & The Dove, a collection of poetry (Noemi Press, 2020) and Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press, 2018), a hybrid memoir of my adoption from Korea.

Litany for the Long Moment was awarded the 2016 Essay Press Open Book Prize, named a finalist for the 2018 Chautauqua Janus Prize, honored by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, featured in NPR’s Code Switch 2018 Book Guide, and named by Entropy Magazine as one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2018.

For the past several years, I have been working on two major projects: a multi-disciplinary work of making and memory, titled Artist Unknown, Korean, and a book-length writing project about an American family in the aftermath of the Korean War, tentatively titled In Country. It concerns the idea of repetition compulsion, intergenerational trauma, and war reenactors. I’ve received grants and awards for both works in progress, including a MacColl Johnson Fellowship, and a fellowship from the Howard Foundation. 

From 2016 to 2023, I taught in the Nonfiction Writing Program in the English Department at Brown University. Courses included: Introduction to Creative Nonfiction, Contemporary Asian American Writers, Reframing Race in Art Writing, and The Poet & The Press Release: Rhetoric of Social Change. I designed my classes to be engaged with the community beyond campus, and to have opportunities to deeply consider the real-world implications and consequences of the representations we create in image and in language. 

Prior to returning to teaching, I spent more than a decade working in and with arts and cultural nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. For five years, I was Executive Director of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, an independent nonprofit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. There, I expanded programming to activate a broader and more diverse community of support. At the Rhode Island Foundation, the state’s community foundation, I served first as the Program Office for Arts & Culture, where I worked closely with colleagues at our state’s art council to deepen the capacity of our state’s culturally-specific organizations. I was later appointed to be the Foundation’s inaugural Director of Evaluation & Learning.

I was a first-generation, low-income college student, and I graduated from Brown University with a BA in English, focusing on creative writing. I stayed at Brown to receive an MFA in Writing. In 2016, I received an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

In my professional roles, my creative work, and my civic life, I am guided by questions of access, inclusion, and belonging, because I understand these concerns to be at the center of my identity and positionality. This is my life’s work. I was born in Korea, adopted and raised in a suburb of New York City. Now, I live in Pawtucket, Rhode Island with my family.