About Tanya
Tanya (Hyonhye) Ko Hong is a bilingual Korean American poet and translator. She has an MFA in poetry from Antioch University.
Tanya is the author of four poetry collections, most recently The War Still Within: Poems of the Korean Diaspora (KYSO Flash Press, 2019), written primarily in English. Before that, she published Mother to Myself (Prunsasang Press, 2015) in Korean, Yellow Flowers on a Rainy Day (Oma Books of the Pacific, 2003) in English, and Generation One Point Five (Esprit Books, 1993) in Korean with English translations. Her poetry appears in Rattle, Beloit Poetry Journal, Entropy, Cultural Weekly, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly (published by The Feminist Press), the Choson Ilbo, The Korea Times, and the Aeolian Harp Series Anthology, among others.
Tanya 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. She was a finalist for Frontier’s Chapbook Contest and the Ko Won Literature Award, and a semi-finalist in the Jack Grapes Poetry Contest. She has received grants from the Korean Cultural Center, the Daesan Foundation, and Poets & Writers.
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 she currently translates 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. Tanya’s poems have been translated into Korean, Japanese, Bosnian and Albanian.
Weaving together two cultures, Tanya’s poetry gives voice to multiple generations of Korean and Korean-American women. Her most recent collection, The War Still Within includes a well-researched and vividly imagined sequence of poems based on the experiences of the Korean “comfort women” who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II.
Tanya is a Ph.D. student in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She also holds a post-MFA teaching certificate from Antioch University and a BA in sociology from Biola University.
Tanya lives in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, with her husband and three children. She makes a killer oxtail soup and dances every Monday at six o’clock.
