The weather has been cold and rainy recently. Despite a few weeks of delusionally warm weather in the middle of October, we can’t ignore the old prophecy “Winter is Coming in South Bend!” Once snow hits campus, you probably won’t want to venture out of home and trudge in the snow for an event. But our third 2nd year MFA reading will occur before the snow arrives, and it will be definitely worth it to come and hear poetry from three great poets: Moonseok Choi, Madison McCartha, and Jean Yoon. After going to our last MFA reading this semester, you can be content by staying warm at home and waiting for Santa Claus to leave the throne and give you tons of chocolate for you to survive the winter.
Here is the bio for these cool poets:
Moonseok Choi was born in Seoul, South Korea, but spent 6 years of his childhood in the wilderness of Kansas picking up English. His fluency in both languages earned him a BA at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College, and allowed him to serve as a military translator in the ROK Army Special Forces for 2 years. He majored in Comparative Literature and Culture and became 11 different people for his senior thesis to write a fictional anthology of world poetry.
Moonseok won Yonsei’s Academy of American Poets Prize in 2014 for his sonnet “A Postcard from İzmir.” He enjoys writing in traditional forms as much as experimenting with contemporary poetry, and takes inspiration from Federico Garcia Lorca, John Berryman, Kenneth Koch, and many more. His other interests include teaching, translating both literature and official documents, watching and analyzing films, and exploring issues of gender, race and discrimination in Korea and America.
Graduating from Beloit College, Madison McCartha has had flash-fiction published in Burrow Press, and poetry in Nightjar Review, Verse Press, and The Pinch. Raised in San Diego, Madison recently spent his time freezing to death in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he served both as Asst. Editor and Design Editor for Cream City Review, and became the Poetry Editor for Storm Cellar Quarterly. At Notre Dame, he reads for the Notre Dame Review, and has served as the Managing Editor for Yield Magazine. Artists who have influenced him include Antonin Artaud, Aimé Césaire, Peter Gizzi, Kim Hyesoon, Dorothea Lasky, Larry Levis, Anne Waldman, Kara Walker, and Yoko Tawada. Madison’s interests include horror flicks, affect theory, shamanism, Björk, and a capacious poetry capable of housing a multiplicitous self.
Jean uses writing, speaking, singing, video, and gesture to investigate the relationships between language, memory, and the body.
The reading will be on Wednesday November 15th, 2017, at 7 p.m. in the Geddes Hall Auditorium.
I will be there, and hope you can come too.
Best, Lavinia