2024 Wisconsin Sijo Competition
Winners | Judges | Winners' Sijo
Judges
David McCann |
Seong-Kon Kim | Chuck Newell |
David McCann was born in Lewiston ME, grew up in Cambridge MA, received his B.A. from Amherst College, served in the first Peace Corps group to go to Korea, ROK, 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 was appointed as the first Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature at Harvard in 1997. He retired on his birthday, July 1, in 2014.
During his graduate studies at Harvard he took creative writing classes with Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Shaw, and Jane Shore.
David has published 32 books. His translations of poems by individual Korean poets have been published by Columbia University Press, Princeton University Press, Quarterly Review of Literature, and other presses. He translated the poems for The Temple of Words, An Anthology of Modern Korea Buddhist Poetry published in 2017 by the Jogye Buddhist Temple Order. Eleven books of his own 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. He has also published several books on Korean literary and cultural history. Several of his sijo have been translated and published recently in the Korean sijo journal Sijo Munhak.
David is a member of the poets group Every Other Thursday.
Seong-Kon Kim is a Professor Emeritus of Seoul National University and a Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College. From 2012 to 2017, Kim was President of the Literary Translation Institute of Korea, which was a Vice Minister level post.
On May 19, 2017, Kim received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the State University of New York. In 2018, Kim taught at George Washington University as Dean's Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities and at the University of Málaga in Spain as a Visiting Professor. In the same year, Felipe VI, King of Spain, decorated Kim with La Orden del Merito Civil. In 2019, Kim taught at the University of California, Irvine as a Visiting Professor.
Professor Kim received his Ph.D. in English from SUNY/Buffalo under Professor Leslie A. Fiedler and studied comparative literature at Columbia University under Professor Edward W. Said. Professor Kim has received, among others, the SUNY/Buffalo International Distinguished Alumni Award, CU Distinguished Alumnus Award, and the Fulbright Distinguished Alumnus Award. In 2008, Kim received the Kim Hwantae Award for Literary Criticism and in 2014 the Woo Ho Humanities Award.
He was the founding President of the Korean Association of Literature and Film, President of the International Association of Comparative Korean Studies, President of the Korean Association of Modern Fiction in English, and President of the American Studies Association of Korea.
Kim was editor of literary journals such as Literature & Thought, 21st Century Literature, and Contemporary World Literature. In addition, Kim has been a regularly featured columnist for the Korea Herald since 2003. His Herald columns have frequently appeared in international media such as The Star, The Straits Times, and The Empire State News.
Previously, Professor Kim has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Pennsylvania State University, and Brigham Young University and conducted research at Harvard-Yenching Institute and Oxford University.
Chuck Newell teaches English at The Baylor School in Chattanooga, TN. For the past 10 years, he has taught sijo writing in his classes. He has also won awards for his own sijo and haiku.