Joey S. Kim, author of the forthcoming chapbook Body Facts, shares who and what she's currently reading.
Diode: Which contemporary authors or movements inform your work?
Joey S. Kim: Cathy Park Hong, Ocean Vuong, Claudia Rankine. The Romantic movement and its lyrical “I” speaker also shapes my work, as I research the Romantics and their poetics.
Diode: What are you currently reading? Which books, magazines, etc. do you find yourself returning to?
JSK: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, and the New Yorker.
Joey S. Kim's Body Facts tells the story of a speaker who is Korean, American, woman, and body. It weaves together Korean history and aesthetics, the speaker’s childhood and family stories, U.S. foreign policy with North Korea, and the things we do and shouldn’t do to our bodies.
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. Body Facts is her debut book of poems. Twitter: @Joeykim
