Kim Ki-Taek (born 1957) has successfully juggled the life of a salaried man and that of a poet for the past twenty years. In his poetry Kim focuses on human physicality and the relationship between the body and the violence inflicted upon it. He believes that fear and compulsion are integral parts of the human body. Because of this, Kim has been described as "an observer of minute and microscopic details." His major works include Fatal Sleep (1991), Storm in the Eye of a Needle (1994), Office Worker (1999), Cow (2005), Chewing Gum (2009), Splitting, Splitting (2012), and El Chicle, a Spanish translation published in Mexico (2012). He is the recipient of the Kim Soo-young, Hyundai, and Midang literary awards, among others. He teaches poetry writing at Kyung Hee Cyber University, Seoul.
Eun Joo Kim was born in Seoul and grew up in New York. She studied English and American literature at Brandeis University, New York University, and most recently at the University of Minnesota, where she received her Ph.D. She currently teaches at NYU Shanghai.
