Join Black Ocean and the Woodberry Poetry Room for an evening of readings and conversation celebrating the Moon Country Korean Poetry series, which brings contemporary Korean poetry into English translation. The program will explore the poems themselves as well as the intimate, collaborative work of carrying voice, image, rhythm, and cultural context across languages.

Through readings and discussion, the participants will offer a glimpse into the choices, discoveries, and productive tensions that shape poetry in translation. The evening will be moderated by Black Ocean founder and publisher Janaka Stucky, with readings by Spencer Lee-Lenfield, Mattho Mandersloot, and Shin Hae-uk.

IN-PERSON ATTENDANCE: Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Harvard University. Free and open to the public. 

Spencer Lee-Lenfield is a translator and scholar of Korean literature and an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he teaches translation studies and researches Korean-English literary translation. His translation of Shin Hae-uk’s Biologicity, published by Black Ocean, was nominated for the 2025 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. His translations and writing have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, New England Review, The Yale Review, and The New York Review of Books.

Mattho Mandersloot is a literary translator working from Korean into English and Dutch. A former taekwondo athlete, he earned a BA in classics from King’s College London, an MA in translation from the School of Oriental and African Studies and an MSt in Korean studies from Oxford. Among others, he has translated bestselling authors Cho Nam-joo and Sang Young Park. He has led several poetry translation workshops at the Poetry Translation Centre in London, and in 2020, he was awarded The Korea Times’ 51st Modern Korean Literature Translation Award for poetry.

Shin Hae-uk is the author of three poetry books in Korean in addition to essay collections and a novel. She won Korea’s Author’s Choice Emerging Poet Award in 2010 and received the Kim Hyun Literary Prize in 2022. She holds a doctorate in Korean literature from Korea University and currently teaches creative writing at Dongduk Women’s University in Seoul.

Janaka Stucky is a poet, editor, and the founder and publisher of Black Ocean, an independent nonprofit press dedicated to poetry, translation, and formally adventurous literature. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Ascend Ascend and The Truth Is We Are Perfect, and is currently editing a forthcoming anthology of funeral poems for Copper Canyon Press. Through Black Ocean, he publishes the Moon Country Korean Poetry series, bringing contemporary Korean poetry into English translation.

Please contact us with any questions about this event. We can be reached by email at poetryrm@fas.harvard.edu or via phone at (617) 495-2454. We encourage persons with disabilities who would like to request accommodations or have questions about physical access to contact Houghton Library at least three days in advance of the reading.