Please join us for a conversation with poet Tanya Ko Hong, who will introduce us to her latest writings and cultural activism. Host and WWI president Karen Karbiener will discuss with Tanya the connection between her artistic vision and Whitman’s work as a supporter of America’s earliest women’s rights movements.

Tanya Ko Hong was the first Korean-American recipient of the Yun Doon-ju Korean-American Literature Award. Her segmented poem, “Comfort Woman,” won the 11th Moon Prize from Writing in a Woman’s Voice and received an honorable mention from the Women’s National Book Association. The poem is included in her most recent collection, The War Still Within, which is based on the experiences of Korean “comfort women” who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II.

Born and raised in South Korea, Tanya emigrated to the United States at the age of eighteen. She writes in both English and Korean and is currently translating the work of Arthur Sze into Korean. She has written on parenting, culture, marriage and women’s issues as a columnist for Korea Daily since 1998, and has taught Korean language, creative writing, and bilingual writing workshops to both Korean and English audiences. She has organized dozens of multicultural literary events in Southern California and has been a literary talk show host.

Karen Karbiener, president and founding member of the Walt Whitman Initiative, is a Whitman scholar and teaches at New York University. Winner of the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress and a Fulbright recipient, she has published widely on Whitman (most recently working with Brian Selznick on Live Oak, with Moss, a new illustrated edition of Whitman’s secret same-sex love poems).  As a cultural activist in her hometown, Karen has been working on the campaign to preserve 99 Ryerson Street since 2017, and gave testimony at the hearing to landmark 227 Duffield Place, Brooklyn, last year.  In 2019, Karen participated in the Canadian Whitmanites’ marathon reading of “Song of Myself” in Bon Echo Provincial Park, Canada.