Self-Portrait 8 | AGNI Online

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Translated from the Korean by E. J. Koh and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021

Diego Isaias Hernández Méndez, Convertiendse en Characoteles / Sorcerers Changing into Their Animal Forms (detail), 2013, oil on canvas. Arte Maya Tz’utujil Collection.

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Self-Portrait

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Yi Won is the South Korean author of six books of poetry and essays, including most recently Let Love be Born (2017) and I Am My Affectionate Zebra (2018). In her debut collection in English, The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021), her work ranges from avant-garde prose poems to more lyrical (if dark) free verse, as she examines isolation, loneliness, death, and the passage of time—and in the process upends polite society and Korean literary culture. A successor to feminist poets like Kim Hyesoon, she frequently writes about the perilousness of maintaining one’s human identity in a high-tech, digital environment. She has received, among other honors, the Equity Literature Award and the Poet Town Literary Award. She lives in Seoul, where she is professor of creating writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. (updated 10/2021)

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E. J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others (Tin House Books, 2020), which won the Pacific Northwest Book Award and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and the poetry collection A Lesser Love (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), which won the Pleiades Editors Prize for Poetry. She is the translator, with Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021). Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, AGNI, Slate, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate in Korean and Korean American literature, history, and film at the University of Washington in Seattle. (updated 10/2021)

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Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), which won the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the translator, with E. J. Koh, of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021), which won the Literature Translation Institute of Korea’s Grand Prize. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, The Best Small Fictions, Kenyon Review Online, AGNI, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association. She serves as co-founder of the Adoptee Literary Festival, co-leader of PEN America’s South Florida Chapter, and a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair. (updated 10/2023)