Poetry From the November 2007 issue: Only Connect: World Writing from Iowa

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Ra HeedukRa Heeduk

Ra Heeduk is a poet and professor from South Korea. She received her PhD in Korean Language and Literature from Yonsei University in 2006. She has authored five books of poetry, most recently 사라진 손바닥 [A Disappeared Palm] (2004); one collection of essays, 반 통의 물 [A Water Bucket Filled By Half] (1999); and a volume of literary criticism, 보랏빛은 어디에서 오는가 [Where Does the Purple Come From] (2003). Among her awards is an I-San Prize for Literature (2004). She currently teaches literature at Chosun University in Kwangju.

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Translated from KoreanKorean by WonChungKimWonChungKim and by Christopher MerrillChristopher Merrill

Won-Chung Kim is a professor of English Literature at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, Korea, where he teaches contemporary American poetry, ecological literature, and translation. He earned his Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa in 1993. He has translated Kim Chiha's Heart's Agony and Choi Seungho's Flowers in the Toilet Bowl. He will soon publish translations of Chong Hyonjong's Trees of the World and an anthology of Korean ecological poets. He has also translated E.T. Seton's The Gospel of the Redman and Bernd Heinrich's In a Patch of Fireweed into Korean.

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Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; several edited volumes, among them The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature; and four books of nonfiction, The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, and Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain. He directs the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa.

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