Dr. Joey Kim’s first book of poetry has poetic timing as Asian Americans have been targets of violence across the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Venturing through Korean history, the feminine body, U.S. foreign policy and coming-of-age in midwestern America, Kim’s “Body Facts” will be released by Diode Editions on Tuesday, June 15, after winning an international publication contest last year.
“It’s urgent,” said Kim, assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature in The University of Toledo College of Arts and Letters. “Asians have been here in the U.S. since the 1500s, but it hasn’t been until recently that there has been a national reckoning of Asian Americans as not perpetual foreigners.”
Joey S. Kim is a scholar, creative writer, and 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," a poem forthcoming in her debut chapbook of poems, Body Facts, and first published in Pleiades.
