Whale and Vapor

Kim Kyung Ju is a Seoul-based poet, dramatist and performance artist. His plays have been produced abroad in several countries and his poetry and essays are widely anthologized in South Korea. He has written and translated over a dozen books of poetry, essays, and plays, and has been the recipient of many prizes and awards, including the Korean government's Today's Young Artist Prize and the Kim Su-yong Contemporary Poetry Award. He is the author of WHALE AND VAPOR, translated by Jake Levine (Black Ocean, 2020), BUTTERFLY SLEEP (Tupelo Press, 2019), BRED FROM THE EYES OF A WOLF, translated by Jake Levine (Plays Inverse Press, 2018), and I AM A SEASON THAT DOES NOT EXIST IN THIS WORLD, translated by Jake Levine (Black Ocean, 2016).

Jake Levine has edited, authored, translated, or co-translated over a dozen books, including Kim Yideum's Hysteria (Action Books, 2019), which was the first and only book to win both the National Translation Award and Lucien Stryk Prize. He was a Fulbright fellow to Lithuania in 2010, where he served as program director of Summer Literary Seminars, taught poetry at Vilnius University, and started the Vilnius Bagel Project with Menachem Kaiser. For years he edited poetry at Spork Press, served as the Managing Editor and Editor-in-Chief of Sonora Review, and currently edits and curates the Moon Country Korean Poetry Series at Black Ocean. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Keimyung University and ABD in the comparative literature program at Seoul National University, where he was a Korean Government Scholarship recipient. Beyond literature, he has translated various cultural contents, including the diaries of the Dansaekwha artist, Yun Hyong- keun, and song lyrics for the K-pop group ENHYPEN.