2025 Sejong Writing Competition
Judges
Sijo Judges: David McCann | Mark Peterson | Gyung-ryul Jang
Essay Judges: Bruce Fulton | Seong-Kon Kim | E.J. Koh
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 July 1, 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 Korean 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, and later by 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 in the Korean sijo journal Sijo Munhak.
David is a member of the poets group Every Other Thursday.
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; and 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 monthly column for the Korea Times. He is also working on a documentary film—the "Miracle Battalion"—about a National Guard artillery battalion from southern Utah that fought in the Korean War, saw heavy combat, and lost not a man.
Gyung-ryul Jang received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from Seoul National University, and his Ph.D. degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Jang is now Professor Emeritus of Seoul National University, and a member of the National Academy of Science, Republic of Korea.
He has contributed numerous articles on contemporary literary theory and Korean literature to various literary journals in Korea. He has published two books of critical essays in sijo poetry: Poetics of Temporality: Toward a New Understanding of Sijo Poetry (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2013); and What Does Change and What Should Not Change: Critical Essays in Sijo Poetry (Seoul: Literary Notebook, 2017). Other publications include: What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen: Essays in Korean Literature (2016); Somewhere Between Insight and Blindness: Critical Essays in Contemporary Korean Literary Trend (2017); Is it a Petal or a Butterfly?: Essays in Korean Sijo and Japanese Haiku and Tanka (2017); In Search of Hidden Trails Between Literature and Philosophy: Critical Essays in World Literature (2018); and From Life to Literature, Literature to Life: Critical Essays in Contemporary Korean Literature (2020).
Bruce Fulton is the inaugural occupant of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation, University of British Columbia, where he offers courses in Korean-to-English literary translation as well as all genres and all periods of Korean literature.
He is the co-translator, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of numerous works of modern Korean fiction; general editor of the Modern Korean Fiction series published by the University of Hawai’i Press; recipient of a 2018 Manhae Grand Prize in Literature; co-author with Youngmin Kwon of What Is Korean Literature? (2020); and editor of the Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories (2023).
He is the co-recipient, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of the first U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for a Korean literary work, and the first residency awarded by the Banff International Literary Translation Centre for the translation of a work from any Asian language.
His most recent book-length translations, with Ju-Chan Fulton, are Togani by Gong Ji-young (2023) and Chinatown by Oh Jung-hee (2025, Penguin Modern Classics). The Fultons’ translations of Korean short fiction appear in journals such as Granta, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and the New England Review.
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, he taught at George Washington University and the University of Málaga, and in 2019 at the University of California, Irvine. In the same year, Felipe VI, King of Spain, decorated Kim with La Orden del Merito Civil.
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. He has received numerous awards including the SUNY/Buffalo International Distinguished Alumni Award and the Fulbright Distinguished Alumnus Award.
Kim was the founding President of several Korean and international literary and cultural organizations, and has taught at institutions including the University of California, Berkeley, Pennsylvania State University, Brigham Young University, Harvard-Yenching Institute, and Oxford University. His work as a columnist for the Korea Herald is frequently syndicated internationally.
E.J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others, which won a Washington State Book Award, Pacific Northwest Book Award, Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, and was longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award.
She is the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love, winner of the Pleiades Editors Prize for Poetry. Koh also translated Yi Won’s poetry collection The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, which won the Literature Translation Institute of Korea’s Translation Grand Prize.
Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, Poetry, Teen Vogue, and World Literature Today.
Koh earned her MFA at Columbia University and her PhD at the University of Washington, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and the American Literary Translators Association.