Translation – The Lit Fantastic

S02E04 – Jennifer Kwon Dobbs (Cooking, Militarism, & Transnational Exchange)

The new season of The Lit Fantastic is now airing on KBOO 90.7 Portland Community Radio (we’ve moved from podcast to radio, but will still have old and new episodes archived online at KBOO.fm and on iTunes).

In our fourth episode of season 2 , we talk to the poet Jennifer Kwon Dobbs about a wide range of topics that orbit the idea of transnational exchange and cultural interaction. Beginning with her obsession with cooking and the Korean ingredients and flavors she has had to teach herself as a transnational Korean adoptee, we explore other ways in which which culture and identity is learned/relearned in the body, US militarism in Oklahoma, adoption and identity (re)formation, teaching race in a multilingual home and in the university classroom, and the unexpected complexity of translation and the flow of international poetry when one realizes that it is not a uni-directional exchange, but rather a feedback loop of influence. We close with two poems from Jennifer’s new book, Interrogation Room.

https://soundcloud.com/thelitfantastic/s2-ep-04-jennifer-kwon-dobbs-cooking-militarism-transnational-exchange

https://kboo.fm/media/65338-lit-fantastic-writers-geek-out-050718

Born in Wonju, Republic of Korea and adopted by a steelworker and homemaker in Oklahoma, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is a poet, essayist, and scholar with interests in creative writing, critical adoption studies, Asian American literature, and Korean literary translation. She holds a BA in English from Oklahoma State University, an MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, and an MA in English/PhD in Literature and Creative from the University of Southern California.

Her works include Paper Pavilion (2007), recipient of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award; Interrogation Room (White Pine Press 2018), finalist for the Copper Nickel/Milkweed Jake Adam York Prize; and the chapbooks Notes from a Missing Person (Essay Press 2015); Necro Citizens (forthcoming); and Song of a Mirror, finalist for the Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award. Currently, she is co-editing Radical Kinships: An Anthology of Autocritical Writing with Dr. Jenny Heijun Wills and Joshua Whitehead.

Widely collaborative, Jennifer has partnered with composers, artists, documentary filmmakers, dance choreographers, and virtual reality programmers on a range of interdisciplinary projects that have premiered in Asia, Europe, and North America. In support of her writing and scholarship, she has received grants from the Daesan Foundation, Intermedia Arts, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, Minnesota State Arts Board, among others.

S02E03 – Jenna Lê (Whales, Language, and Returning)

Our third episode in season 2 is an hour-long conversation with poet and physician Jenna Lê in which we dive deep into a sea of obsessions, ranging from the Bronte Sisters to whales, with an odd assortment of topics along the way. We touch on languages lost and found, the cultural importance of names, Taiwanese melodramas from the 80s, and return again to “returning” – the biological and psychological need to find our way home. As always, the episode closes with poetry.

https://soundcloud.com/thelitfantastic/s2-ep-03-jenna-le-whales-language-and-returning

https://kboo.fm/media/64588-lit-fantastic-writers-geek-out-040218

A Minnesota-born daughter of Vietnam War refugees, Jenna Lê earned her B.A. in mathematics before obtaining her M.D. She lives and works as a physician and educator in the Upper Valley region of New Hampshire. She is the author of two full-length collections of poems, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), which was a Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller, and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018; first edition: Anchor & Plume Press, 2016), which won Second Place in the 2017 Elgin Awards. Her poetry, fiction, essays, book criticism, and poetry translations have been published widely. Le has been a Minnetonka Review Editor’s Prize winner, a two-time Alpha Omega Alpha Pharos Poetry Competition winner, a William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition finalist, a Michael E. DeBakey Poetry Award finalist, a Pamet River Prize semifinalist, a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best of the Net nominee, and a Rhysling Award nominee. Since 2014 (after her Pharos Poetry Competition wins), Le has also served on the editorial board of the Pharos, the journal of the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society. Her hobbies include drawing and painting. Visit her online at https://jennalewriting.com