Diode author Dr. Joey S. Kim is a 2020 recipient of the Toledo, Ohio Arts Commission Merit Award!
“The Merit Award gives me the opportunity and privilege to research and share the overlooked histories of my Korean motherland for my poetry and forthcoming books. My artistic practice weaves together Korean history and aesthetics, childhood and family stories, U.S. foreign policy with North Korea, and the pressures humans place on their bodies.”
The Arts Commission's Merit Award program recognizes outstanding local literary, performing and visual artists, rewarding the many hours and personal resources each artist dedicates to their artform. Four awards are given: one $2500 award, two $1000 awards, and one $500 award. Recipients are selected by a panel of renowned artists and cultural leaders from around the Midwest, with a range or expertise across artistic disciplines. Kim was awarded $2500.
Joey S. Kim is a scholar, creative writer, and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo. Her poetry ventures through Korean history, the feminine body, U.S. foreign policy, and coming-of-age in midwestern America. She researches nineteenth-century global Anglophone literature and poetics. Her work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Pleiades: Literature in Context, Burningword Literary Journal, Essays in Romanticism, and elsewhere. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee for her poem "Plunder," which was first published in Pleiades and is forthcoming in her debut chapbook of poems, Body Facts. Twitter: @Joeykim
