ABOUT ME

I’m a Korean American writer, artist, and letterpress printer. I come from a family of artists, and my work grows out of an ongoing conversation with that inheritance: what we carry, what we make of it, and what we choose to pass on.

Poetry is one place where I return to these questions. Printing is another. I’m drawn to the movement between language and its physical form, to the way a poem changes when it becomes an object someone can hold. Working with a press asks for a particular kind of attention: to the page, the materials, and the many small decisions that shape a finished piece.

After nearly a decade of searching, I found a Vandercook SP-20 in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Over the following years, I built a printing studio around it. During maternity leave with my first child, I began Barahm Press, a micropress supporting writers and artists of color through digital folios and chapbooks. We are now preparing our second digital folio and printing our first chapbook series, Field Notes.

My creative life also informs the work I do with organizations. For more than 20 years, I’ve worked in resource mobilization, helping movement leaders, community organizations and communities gather the resources and funding they need for the futures they are building. After the birth of my second child, I founded Veridian Collective to shape a practice more closely aligned with my values. That work is beginning to meet my printmaking practice through collaborations rooted in community stories and memory.

After a decade away from a sustained writing practice, I am returning to poetry with renewed commitment. My work has appeared in various publications, and fellowships and residencies have offered places to learn, write, and find community. Across writing, printing, and resource mobilization, I keep returning to questions of attention and care: whose stories we make room for, how we give them form, and what allows them to continue.