Born in Wonju, Republic of Korea and adopted to Oklahoma, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs (she/her) earned a MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. She is the author of Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press Poetry Prize 2007), Interrogation Room (White Pine Press 2018), and the chapbooks Notes from a Missing Person (Essay Press 2015) and Necro Citizens (hochroth Bielefeld 2019, German-English editions). A recipient of grants from Intermedia Arts, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, Minnesota State Arts Board among others, she is associate professor of creative writing and directs Race and Ethnic Studies at St. Olaf College. She lives in Saint Paul.

Fellowship Statement

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is a transnational poet and scholar whose work confronts militarism and racial-gendered-class violence dividing kinships, selves, and imagination. Inspired by the Korean diaspora to which she belongs, she aspires to create alternative ways of feeling, knowing, and remembering to resist over sixty years of unending Korean War and its legacies. Her work has appeared previously in Agni, Blackbird, Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Jubilat, Korean Literature Now, Massachusetts Review, Poetry International, and elsewhere. Currently, Kwon Dobbs is developing a mixed-genre, multilingual book manuscript about white settler colonialisms and camptown kitsch in the digital age.

Photo by Thaiphy Phan-Quang.