https://www.jkwondobbs.com/paper20pavilion20e2809420jennifer20kwon20dobbs_files-1 daily 0.75 2022-04-14 https://www.jkwondobbs.com/new-cover-page daily 1.0 2022-04-13 https://www.jkwondobbs.com/events daily 0.75 2024-09-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/1531685672056-417MIS0PDVI8NZ0QWUFG/Events-Image.jpg EVENTS - UPCOMING & RECENT Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Diasporic Adoptee Writing launch at Brookline Booksmith, LangueFlow Conference on Code-Switching in the Arts, Mercy Street Readings, The Neustadt Literature Festival, and the Korean Literature Translation Institute in Seoul Selected interviews and writing in AGNI, LyrikLine, Cratelit, Galatea Resurrects, Korean Quarterly (print), The Lit Fantastic, The Massachusetts Review, Speaking of Marvels and Words on a Wire. KLTI Diaspora Literature and Culture Event | Book Talk with Cho Hae-Jin, author of I MET HAN LOH KI-WON, September 29 at 3-4:30 PM | Community House MASIL (14 Myeongdong 11 gil, Jung-gu, Seoul) KLTI Diaspora Literature and Culture Event | DIASPORA Cine Talk with Anthony Shim at 5:30-9:30 PM September 29 at 5:30-9:30 PM | Emu art space (7, Gyeonghuigung 1ga-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul) Jenny Tang presents FANG SI-CHI'S FIRST LOVE PARADISE in conversation with Jennifer Kwon Dobbs October 31 at 7 PM | Magers and Quinn https://www.jkwondobbs.com/interrogation-room daily 0.75 2022-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/1502251354511-Y0K570WNJ2U5JFY8BMGF/Screen+Shot+2017-07-27+at+8.15.44+PM.png Interrogation Room - Interrogation Room "Timely" -- The New York Times "Vigorous restlessness" -- World Literature Today “Elegant, forceful” — Electric Literature "An austere singing" -- 4square review “Elegantly crafted and exquisitely arresting“ — Asian American Literature Fans Winner, Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Creative Writing: Poetry Finalist, Copper Nickel/Milkweed Editions Jake Adam York Prize “A timely book, and a needed book, Kwon Dobbs’s second collection Interrogation Room is a tour de force of documents, images, handwritten notes, erasures, and poetry, that provides a diasporic healing through its haunting lyrical experimentalism. As lyric interrogations, the poems transform the limits of history, the personal, poetry, and the family. In doing so, this innovative poetry collection by Kwon Dobbs will invigorate and move poets and readers in Asian American Studies and beyond for generations to come.” — judges’ citation, Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Creative Writing: Poetry Sample poems appear in AGNI, Blackbird, Columbia Review: A Journal of Art and Literature, Diode Poetry Journal, Indiana Review, Jubilat, and are anthologized in One for the Money: The Sentence as a Poetic Form and The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith & Spirit. Available at your favorite independent bookseller, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, and everywhere. https://www.jkwondobbs.com/paper-pavilion daily 0.75 2022-01-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/1501758669654-9932HTMMML28299VB4XI/image-asset.jpeg Paper Pavilion - PAPER PAVILION Winner, 2007 White Pine Press Poetry Prize Co-winner, New England Poetry Club's Sheila Motton Book Award Through the language of a post-Korean War diaspora, opera, fairy tales, and mythic landscapes, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs´s debut collection of poems steers its readers through "a shape of loss I cannot trace" to construct alternative histories that span cultural and geographic distances. Paper Pavilion blends English- and Korean-language poetic forms in search of "mater / the heart of matter / matter with a heart / maternus and everything bearing her trace, / bearing her variously in the grain of everything." Sample poems appear in 5AM, The Cimarron Review, Crazyhorse, Cream City Review, From the Fishouse, MiPOesias, Poetry NZ, the Poetry Foundation's digital archive, and are anthologized in Echoes Upon Echoes and Language for a New Century. Available at Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, your favorite independent bookseller, and everywhere. https://www.jkwondobbs.com/pedagogy daily 0.75 2022-02-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/1507380314514-FP6EIEBCHLDZHE4DKJOF/books.jpg PEDAGOGY - PedaGOGY Jennifer Kwon Dobbs’s teaching interests include creative writing, poetry, Asian American literature, and critical ethnic studies. Since 1998, she has taught students at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Southern California, Universität Bielefeld, Loyola Marymount University, LaGuardia Community College, St. Olaf College, and elsewhere. In Fall 2008, Jennifer joined St. Olaf College’s English Department and co-founded its creative writing major emphasizing breadth across genres and depth at the 200- and 300-levels in creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry writing. Her repertoire of courses includes creative writing workshops; cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and genre-based approaches to reading literature; and interdisciplinary seminars on critical ethnic studies. Focused on innovative, student-centered teaching, Jennifer is a founding member of the Creative Learning Community and a frequent collaborator with the Digital Scholarship Center at St. Olaf (DiSCO) on high-impact, digital curriculum. In 2016, the college’s Trio/Student Support Services recognized her with an “Above and Beyond Award” for “playing an important role in shaping students’ lives and expanding their minds in ways they hadn’t realized.” The St. Olaf senior class of 2018 honored Jennifer by selecting her to deliver their last lecture, and the St. Olaf faculty chose her to present the 2018 fall Mellby lecture. With Dr. Nancy Thompson, she is a founding program director for the Department of Race, Ethnic, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, which will launch in Fall 2022. In community, Jennifer has led writing workshops in New York, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Minneapolis; supported curriculum development for Nodutdol’s Korean Education and Exposure Program; and served as a teaching artist in poetry for the 2017-18 Loft Mentor Series. https://www.jkwondobbs.com/about daily 0.75 2023-05-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/1507379209397-Z81FPOFFXAVQZ1WOZSV9/phioto-credit-jkd.jpg About https://www.jkwondobbs.com/notes-from-a-missing-person daily 0.75 2017-11-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/1502251725641-ZJFT29WJFRFB9SCK2WCJ/image-asset.jpeg Notes from a Missing Person - Notes from a Missing Person In seven lyric essay-poems, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs constructs a language of search to pierce through erasures of history, naming, community, family, and selfhood. As an archive punctuated by the author's found images and original artwork by Jane Jin Kaisen, this digital chapbook or series of “notes [seeking] to suture space and to shift perspective” summons absences--made by classed and gendered violence against single Korean mothers and their children--to speak. Sample texts appear in The Journal of the Motherhood Initiative at York University and are anthologized in Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland and Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence. Available as EP 24 in the Essay Press digital EP Series. https://www.jkwondobbs.com/necro-citizens daily 0.75 2022-01-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/1502251925408-RXLYHCUM2TV06I9LI9HU/image-asset.jpeg Necro Citizens - Necro Citizens Finalist, Diode Editions Chapbook Contest U.S. War Department training videos, public health, Cold War sexual politics, and the illegibility of Korean single mothers and their children inform this chapbook of poems available in English, German translation, and dual edition with slipcase from hochroth Verlag. Learn more about Necro Citizens at Fix Poetry and Lyrikline. Books may be ordered directly from the publisher and shipped in Germany or internationally. A research exchange with transnational artists Jane Jin Kaisen and Guston Sondin-Kung supported the writing of some of the poems. Samples appear in AGNI, Freshwater Review, Hyphen, Indiana Review, and MIRAMAR. https://www.jkwondobbs.com/forthcoming daily 0.75 2023-02-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/0912291b-e184-4f08-9883-9fa5c2e19bf9/msab2.jpg Forthcoming https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/1507637759881-C8G952PVH4PJRAJ8VOJI/Radical-Kinships.jpg Forthcoming - A Ceremony A collection of mixed-genre poems Emerging from research that I conducted while a 2021 Masterson fellow at the University of Oklahoma’s Western History Collections, the poems from this forthcoming collection explore white adjacency, Jim Crow legacies in Oklahoma, and U.S. militarism’s interior lives rooted in class and settler-colonial social experiments. Poems from the manuscript in preparation have been published in Pleiades and supported by a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship and a Minnesota State Arts Board “Creative Support for Individuals” grant. https://www.jkwondobbs.com/approaching-winter daily 0.75 2019-03-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/1502713764123-NIYU4CT4N67EUY0PH0OI/image-asset.jpeg Approaching Winter - Approaching Winter “Approaching Winter” is a poetry-dance collaboration with choreographer Keith Johnson and Janice Haws Roberts, performed by Janice Haws Roberts, Northfield, (September 2016). Approaching Winter: a dance work about aging is a solo dance rich with movement metaphors relating to the journey of a woman, who is also a dancer, confronting the signs of aging. Performed by Janice Haws Roberts, Professor of Dance, with live poetry reading by guest artist Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Associate Professor of English and Program Director of Race and Ethnic Studies at St. Olaf College. https://www.jkwondobbs.com/the-woman-the-orphan-and-the-tiger daily 0.75 2017-08-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/1502714545013-GTCA9CRRAPN9SSB458VY/image-asset.jpeg The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger - the woman, the orphan, and the tiger The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger, begins with the sound of women’s voices speaking of histories of violence, of things repressed and silenced. Gradually, their voices accumulate into a cacophony of pure sonic intensity against an extreme slow-motioned image of a woman survivor of Japan’s military sexual slavery who, in the absence of words to accurately account for her suffering, gets up and walks into the center of a war crimes tribunal court room and gestures wildly before she faints. The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger explores ways in which trauma is passed on from previous generations to the present through a sense of being haunted. Following a group of international adoptees and other women of the Korean diaspora in their 20s and 30s, the film uncovers how the return of the repressed confronts and destabilizes narratives that have been constructed to silence histories of pain and violence inflicted onto the bodies and lives of women and children. A genealogy is created by relating the stories of three generations of women: the former ‘comfort’ women who were subjected to military sexual slavery by the Japanese military between World War I and World War II – women who have worked as sex-workers around US military bases in South Korea since the 1950s to the present – and transnational adopted women from South Korea to the West since the Korean War. Composed of oral testimonies, poetry, public statements and interview fragments, the filmic narrative unfolds in a non-chronologic and layered manner. By reinterpreting and juxtaposing historical archive footage with recorded documentary material and staged performative actions, multiple spaces and times are conjoined to contour how a nexus of militarism, patriarchy, racism and nationalism served to suppress and marginalize certain parts of the population and how this part of world history continues to reverberate in the present moment. https://www.jkwondobbs.com/song-for-a-small-guest daily 0.75 2017-11-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/1503885059419-L55XABXW7LJR4YJYOWF3/.jpg Song for a Small Guest - Song for a Small Guest “Song for a Small Guest.” Text by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs. Music by Nebal Maysaud. Performed by Corey Hamm (pianist) and Will George (tenor) for Art Song Lab, Vancouver B.C. 2016. https://www.jkwondobbs.com/libretto daily 0.75 2019-03-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/1502715027478-C609U8QQ703HBEN3ONYU/image-asset.png Libretto - Libretto “Libretto.” Text by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs. Choreography by Jennifer Mellor. Performed by Jennifer Mellor Dance Project, San Francisco and New York. https://www.jkwondobbs.com/monkey-house daily 0.75 2018-07-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/1502715209180-PQD6EKTL9X5NPVM4MHOZ/image-asset.png Monkey House - Monkey House “Monkey House" is a virtual reality poem in collaboration with the artist Jane Jin Kaisen and computer programmer Magnus Cardell supported by a Digital Humanities on the Hill grant from St. Olaf College (2017-18) “Monkey House: a Digital Poem” is an original work merging together poetry by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs and multimedia footage by award-winning artist Jane Jin Kaisen in a digital environment. Its title comes from the American soldiers’ name for a now neglected and dilapidated U.S. Military STD Clinic located in Dongducheon near the Demilitarized Zone--a violent holdout of the Cold War and a lush nature preserve paradoxically protected by violence. Drawing upon publishing platforms as a means of composition and inquiry, the digital poem’s audio and visual text will assume “a bacterial view” and contaminate still shots from archival U.S. military films on G.I. sexual health and Kaisen’s video of Monkey House. Networked together, these textual-imagistic proliferations will stage and explore Cold War legacies of bodily decay, ideological purity, militarized hygiene, theater, surveillance, and greenworld hazmat as persistent spectral presences of the unending Korean War. https://www.jkwondobbs.com/prose daily 0.75 2022-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5979caca579fb3cca0a714a1/1531685530780-ST94FKRF0KVZNOW35VW0/Prose-Image.jpg PROSE - PROSE Since 1999, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs has conducted interdisciplinary research focusing on the cultural and literary representations of South Korean adoptees and single mothers, North Korean orphans, and unnaturalized persons sent to the U.S. for the purpose of intercountry adoption. Her scholarly work has informed transnational projects such as Justice for Adoptees: Stop the Deportation of Russell Green and foreign policy debates on North Korean orphan histories. In addition to contributing literary essays and book reviews to the Asian American Writers Workshop, Mascara Literary Review, Salamander, among others, she has given numerous interviews and presentations about Korean single mothers and transnational/transracial adoptees most recently at Book Forum and The New York Review. Her writing has been mentioned in the anthologies The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature, The Intercountry Adoption Debate: Dialogues Across Disciplines, Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry, and The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature. https://www.jkwondobbs.com/homepage daily 0.75 2022-04-14