LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
Literary Homecomings: A Dispatch from Los Angeles scrap
by
Jennifer Kwon dobbs
September 7, 2026
Participating in LTI Korea’s “Korean Literature: Languages of Love and the Future” in Los Angeles and at the LA Times Festival of Books felt deeply personal to me. LA’s towering palm trees lining the 110 Harbor Freeway’s downtown exits and the University of Southern California’s red-brick Romanesque campus, the festival’s host site, reminded me of my doctoral studies in literature and creative writing. In 2001, during my first year as a USC PhD student, I began reading Korean poetry in translation in a Koreatown studio apartment overlooking Wilshire Avenue.
My first encounter with Korean poetry took place on a Hewlett Packard laptop equipped with dial-up internet and Windows XP. Brother Anthony of Taizé’s extensive translations, featured on his Sogang University blog, introduced me to poets such as Kim Chi Ha, Kim Sowol, Ko Un, and Ku Sang. Brother Anthony’s writing inspired me to seek out translations of contemporary Korean poets, but few existed in the early aughts and usually only as part of an anthology published by a university or small press. Most of the available single-authored titles of Korean literature in my personal library came from White Pine Press’s Korean Voices Series—possibly the oldest US-English series devoted to contemporary and classic Korean poetry in translation.
Returning to Los Angeles decades later as a member of LTI Korea’s delegation of writers was humbling and joyful. It was edifying to witness Korean literature’s robust, enthusiastic audience. At our events, there was no single sort of reader who attended. Readers ranged in age, identity, and background—perhaps a microcosm of LA’s cosmopolitan diversity. Yet they all shared a heartfelt excitement for Korean literature that moved me greatly, as I remembered how nascent its audience, beyond the academy, seemed almost three decades ago.
Not only were English-translated works limited in number, but opportunities to hear Korean poetry in 2001 were fewer still. (YouTube launched and uploaded its first video in 2005.) At USC, my friend and fellow PhD student, Unhae Langis, whose ancestors include Kim Sowol, encouraged my literary interests. She introduced me to her father who recited “Azaleas” (진달래꽃) in Korean one evening after dinner at her West LA home. Although I didn’t know Korean then (and still rely on Konglish today to communicate with my relatives), I listened to the supple rhythms of Kim Sowol’s language and internalized them for poems of my own. In this way, Korean began writing on my senses and taught me, as an adoptee diasporic person, how to yearn.
My role in “Korean Literature: Languages of Love and the Future” was to engage in a panel discussion with the poet Lee Min-ha. In an interview with Yonhap News that took place after the panel, Lee Min-ha said —or rather, I paraphrase— “Poetry is not read, but felt.” Guided by this shared belief, we made an impromptu change to our panel’s planned format and began our conversation inside California State University San Bernardino’s student union with the poet reading from her collection Phantom Limbs. I was delighted to present the English translation by Jein Han. We symbolically passed the book between us after we each presented to enact how poetry travels across linguistic differences to jolt a reader with lyricism and imagistic power.
Our insightful moderator, the Korean literary critic Kang Dong-ho, asked us to ponder, “What do you believe poetry can do that no other art form can? And where do you see the power of poetry allowing it to connect with readers across the boundaries of a particular nation or culture?” Thinking about Lee seonsaengnim’s vigorous poetry, I admire how it reinvents language by creating new kinships among words that accrue into worlds of their own. Han’s nuanced translation carries this vibrancy into English such that the English-language words are remade and energized in unexpected contexts.
For me, this visceral, aural experience is not unlike what I feel as I’m reading Korean poetry aloud to myself slowly and with the aid of a dictionary. Korean is writing on my inner life in ways that are helping me to reconcile forced distances and estrangement. But I am not alone. Because of the visionary, dedicated work of organizations like LTI Korea to grow and to nurture a talented community of literary translators, Korean literature is writing on the lives of readers around the world, who are also turning to its original imagery and provocative narratives to make sense of global forces shaping twenty-first-century human conditions.
It’s an honor to participate in translated Korean literature’s astonishing, continuing story and to reflect, in this dispatch from Los Angeles, on its extraordinary rise and impact on global readers like myself. I’m thankful to LTI Korea for the gift of conversation with Lee Min-ha, Kang Dong-ho, and the delegation’s writers, and for the literary homecoming that was my festival experience.
Writer 필자 소개
Jennifer Kwon dobbs
Born in Wonju, Korea, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs 허수진 is the author of two books and two chapbooks, and senior poetry editor of AGNI.
Her co-translation with Johanna Domokos of Niillas Holmberg’s Underfoot (White Pine Press, 2022) received the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize. She lives in Minneapolis.
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