Myung Mi Kim was born in Seoul, Korea in 1957, on December 6th. She migrated to America directly following the Korean War when she was nine years old. Myung attended the University of Iowa, where she earned a degree in fine arts. She also earned other degrees from Johns Hopkins University, as well as Oberlin College. She remained in the world of academia as she went on to teach creative writing at the University of San Francisco, and now she currently is a professor of English at the University of Buffalo in upstate New York. Myung is recognized for her post-modern style of writing. There are three books of poetry she has written: Dura, The Bounty, and Under Flag. She has won 2 Gertrude Stein Awards for her works of North American Poetry. One of the most important things for Myung Mi Kim is her traditional influence from her childhood. She feels as though her abrupt removal from Korea made a profound impact on her connection with language. She stated, "There's something about being nine or so—you have enough access to the language, you feel a connection to the culture fully. And yet again, that culture is and will be embedded in you. In this strange region of knowing and not knowing, I have access to Korea as a language and culture but this access is shaped by rupture (leaving the country, the language). When I engage 'Korea'—what resemblance does it have to any 'real' place, culture, or the language spoken there? So in this effort and failure of bridging, reconfiguring, shaping, and being shaped by loss and absence, one enters a difficult negotiation with an Imaginary and a manner of listening which to me is the state of writing."
What I take this to mean is that Myung uses writing to bridge the gap between a previous place in her life, and her current state of being. Language can be often times hard to articulate within speech, however poetry and creative writing have helped Myung and many other writers (especially those whose first language wasn’t English, but had it forced upon them) find a common language which they could use to communicate.
In Myung’s personal life she moved a lot when she came to America because her father was a surgeon whose job placement caused them to continuously change zones. She excelled in High School, and would up graduating a year early. During high school she wrote her first English poem at the age of 14. It being such an outstanding poem not just for the fact that she was 14 year old who only recently learned English, but because it was actually beautifully written, wound up in a local literary magazine. Though Myung did not consider writing as a career until much later in life.
