2021 Wisconsin Sijo Competition
Winners | Judges | Winners' Sijo
Judges
David McCann served in the first Peace Corps group to go to Korea, 1966-68, then received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. He taught Classical Japanese language and literature at Cornell University, and then Korean literature at Cornell and at Harvard. He retired in 2014 as the first Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature at Harvard.
David has published 32 books. Eleven collections of his poems have been published, including a dual-language edition of his sijo poems, Urban Temple, originally published by Bo Leaf Books in 2010, from Changbi Publishers, Seoul, in 2012. Three of his collections—Out of Words, Lost and Found, and Same Bird—have been published by Moon Pie Press. Most recently, a chapbook collection of his poems, The Under Story, was published by the poets group Every Other Thursday, in 2021.
David McCann’s poems have received a Pushcart Prize, Touchstone Award, and publication in Haiku 2015, 100 notable Haiku from 2014. He received the Korean Manhae Prize in 2004 and the Korean Culture Order of Merit in 2006. His sijo poem “Landscape,” published in the Arlington Red Letter Poem Project, was translated and carved into one of the stones in the Sijo Stones Garden in Boryeong, Korea.
Mark Peterson (professor emeritus of Korean history, literature and language, Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages. Brigham Young University, Provo, UT) received B.A.’s in Asian Studies and Anthropology from Brigham Young University in 1971. He received his M.A. in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1987, both from Harvard University in the field of East Asian Languages and Civilization. Prior to coming to BYU in 1984 he was the director of the Fulbright program in Korea from 1978 to 1983.
He has been the coordinator of the Asian Studies Program and was the director of the undergraduate programs in the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies. Dr. Peterson is a member of the Association for Asian Studies, where he was formerly the chair of the Korean Studies Committee; was also the book review editor for the Journal of Asian Studies for Korean Studies books. He is also a member of the Royal Asiatic Society, the International Association for Korean Language Education, the International Korean Literature Association, and the American Association of Korean Teachers. He served as past editor-in-chief for the Korea Journal, published by UNESCO in Korea, from 2015 to 2017.
Currently he is working with a research center he founded called The Frog Outside the Well Research Center, which publishes an active YouTube channel by that name. He also writes a weekly column for the Korea Times.