SmokeLong Quarterly

E. J. Koh is the author of A Lesser Love, recipient of the Pleiades Editors Prize, called “first-rate, intelligent, pure-gold – a triumph.” Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Columbia Review, Southeast Review, World Literature Today, TriQuarterly, Narrative, The Margins, PEN America, La Petite Zine, Poetry Northwest, Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (Black Ocean Press, 2014), & others. Koh accepted fellowships and scholarships from The MacDowell Colony, Kundiman, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and Jack Straw Writers Program. While speaking at AWP, Asian American Educators Alliance, ALTA, Split this Rock, and festivals like Bumbershoot, Koh discusses subjects of contemporary Korean American voices in poetry & translation.​ ​Koh earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Creative Writing Poetry & Literary Translation in Korean and Japanese. She is completing her PhD at the University of Washington for English Language and Literature in Seattle where she further researches the culture-specific phenomena of Jeong, most closely translated as a bond or bondage by love. Her forthcoming memoir How to Age with Grace alights the reader to the emotional trauma and surprising levity of her mother’s 49 love letters posted to her in 2004 and discovered in 2013. Koh won the 2017 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship under Don Mee Choi and is translating poet Yi Won’s poetry books When They Ruled the Earth (1996) and The Lightest Motorcycle in the World (2007).

Stories in Smokelong Quarterly

Story: Ueno Zoo
Interview: Smoke and Mirrors: An Interview with E.J. Koh