Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, and an MA in English and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. Her poetry collections are Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press, 2007) and Interrogation Room (White Pine Press, 2018), and the chapbooks Notes from a Missing Person (2015) and Necro Citizens (in German) (2018).

Kwon Dobbs’s work has appeared in many magazines, including Agni, Asian American Literary Review, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, Jubilat, Mascara Review, and Poetry International. Her poems and essays have been translated into German, Greek, Korean, and Turkish. Poet Norman Dubie notes, “Jennifer Kwon Dobbs writes a harrowing poem. ... think of Wallace Stevens worrying about the traversing of the void, yes, folded and jeweled like time.”

Adopted from South Korea and reunited with her family, she is associate professor of English at St. Olaf College where she teaches creative writing, poetry and poetics, and Asian American literature. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.