Walter K. Lew is a

Korean-American Korean Americans are Americans of Korean ancestry (mostly from South Korea). In 2015, the Korean-American community constituted about 0.56% of the United States population, or about 1.82 million people, and was the fifth-largest Asian Americans ...

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral or writte ...

and scholar. He has taught creative writing, East Asian literatures, and

Asian American literature Asian American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of Asian descent. Asian American literature became a category during the 1970s but didn't see a direct impact in viewership until later in the 1970s. Perhap ...

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

Mills College Mills College at Northeastern University is a private college in Oakland, California and part of Northeastern University's global university system. Mills College was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California; it was ...

, the

University of Miami The University of Miami (UM, UMiami, Miami, U of M, and The U) is a private research university in Coral Gables, Florida. , the university enrolled 19,096 students in 12 colleges and schools across nearly 350 academic majors and programs, incl ...

, and

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

. Aside from the award-winning ''Treadwinds: Poems and Intermedia Texts'', Lew is the author, co-author, or editor of seven books and several special journal issues and artist's books. Lew's translations and scholarship on

Korean literature Korean literature is the body of literature produced by Koreans, mostly in the Korean language and sometimes in Classical Chinese. For much of Korea's 1,500 years of literary history, it was written in Hanja. It is commonly divided into classica ...

and Asian American literature have been widely anthologized and he was the first U.S. artist to revive the art of movietelling (live narration of

silent film A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound (or more generally, no audible dialogue). Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements (such as a setting or era) or key lines of dialogue may, when ...

s), beginning in 1982. Lew was the founding editor of the literary and scholarly press, Kaya Production (1993–96), where he solicited, developed, and published such books as

R. Zamora Linmark R. Zamora Linmark, born in Manila, is a Filipino American poet, novelist, and playwright. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. He is the recipient of a Japan-United States Friendship Commission, a winner of a ...

's '' Rolling the R's'', Kimiko Hahn's ''Unbearable Heart'',

Sesshu Foster Sesshu Foster (born April 5, 1957) is an American poet and novelist. Sesshu Foster is a Japanese-American poet of white and Nisei descent. He grew up on Los Angeles’ East Side and came of age in the primarily Chicano neighborhood of City Ter ...

's ''City Terrace Field Manual'', and a new edition of Younghill Kang's ''East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee''. Lew's documentaries and news stories have been broadcast on

CBS News CBS News is the news division of the American television and radio service CBS. CBS News television programs include the ''CBS Evening News'', ''CBS Mornings'', news magazine programs '' CBS News Sunday Morning'', '' 60 Minutes'', and '' 48 H ...

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcasting, public broadcaster and Non-commercial activity, non-commercial, Terrestrial television, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly fu ...

, British ITV, and NHK-Japan. He has often collaborated with visual artists, such as O Woomi Chung, Ashley Ford, and, most continually, the filmmaker Lewis Klahr. Lew presently resides in

Brooklyn, New York Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

and

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania Bethlehem is a city in Northampton and Lehigh Counties in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania, United States. As of the 2020 census, Bethlehem had a total population of 75,781. Of this, 55,639 were in Northampton County and 19, ...

after several years in

Seoul Seoul (; ; ), officially known as the Seoul Special City, is the capital and largest metropolis of South Korea.Before 1972, Seoul was the ''de jure'' capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) as stated iArticle 103 ...

and

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...

Works

SCROTA
with O Woomi Chung, limited edition chapbook, 2014
WITH EYES CLOSED
with O Woomi Chung, site-specific video installations, 2014 * IMPERATIVES OF CULTURE: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era (Ed. with Christopher P. Hanscom and Youngju Ryu),

University of Hawai'i Press A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the ...

, 2013 * EST-CE QUE LA LIGNE A ASSASSINE LE CIRCLE?, with Ashley Ford, limited edition artist's book, 2011 * YI WON, a selection of Yi Won's poetry translated by Walter K. Lew and published as a

chapbook A chapbook is a small publication of up to about 40 pages, sometimes bound with a saddle stitch. In early modern Europe a chapbook was a type of printed street literature. Produced cheaply, chapbooks were commonly small, paper-covered bookle ...

for the 35th

Poetry International Festival Poetry International Web is an international webzine and a poetry archive put together by a collective body of editors around the world and centrally edited in Rotterdam. It was originally launched in 2002. The site presents poetry from many coun ...

, Poetry International,

Rotterdam Rotterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Rotte'') is the second largest city and municipality in the Netherlands. It is in the province of South Holland, part of the North Sea mouth of the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta, via the ''"N ...

, 2004. * TREADWINDS: Poems and Intermedia Texts, Wesleyan University Press, 2002 * EXCERPTS FROM: ∆IKTH DIKTE 딕테/딕티 for DICTEE (1982), Yeuleum Sa (

), 1991 *
Pack Observing Art Basel >< Miami Beach 2008
" (Ed., with Alan R. Clinton), "

Avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...

as Critical Practice" issue of RECONSTRUCTION 9.2 (2009) * KÔRI: The Beacon Anthology of Korean American Fiction (Ed., Comment., with Heinz Insu Fenkl), Beacon Press, 2001 * CRAZY MELON and CHINESE APPLE: The Poems of Frances Chung (Ed., Comment.), Wesleyan University Press, 2000 * PREMONITIONS: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (Ed.), Kaya Production, 1995Amazon book: Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry
/ref> * MUAE: A Journal of Transcultural Production (Ed., Trans.), Kaya Production, 1995-1996
"The Fight for Democracy"
(Associate producer), part 8 (Dir. Carl Byker), of the Emmy-award-winning 10-part documentary series

The Pacific Century The Pacific Century was a 1992 PBS Emmy Award winning ten-part documentary series narrated by Peter Coyote about the rise of the Pacific Rim economies. Alex Gibney was the writer for the series, and Frank Gibney, his father, wrote the companion ...

, Prod. Peter Bull and

Alex Gibney Philip Alexander Gibney (; born October 23, 1953) is an American documentary film director and producer. In 2010, ''Esquire'' magazine said Gibney "is becoming the most important documentarian of our time". Gibney's works as director include '' ...

, 1992. Also awarded an

Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award The Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award honors excellence in broadcast and digital journalism in the public service and is considered one of the most prestigious awards in journalism. The awards were established in 1942 and administered ...

Awards

* Asian American Literary Award, poetry category, The Asian American Writers' Workshop, 2003 *

PEN Center USA PEN Center USA was a branch of PEN, an international literary and human rights organization. It was one of two PEN International Centers in the United States, the other being the PEN America in New York City. On March 1, 2018, PEN Center USA unifi ...

Literary Award, finalist, poetry, PEN Center USA, 2002 * Inter-Arts Fellowship, with

Lewis Klahr Lewis Klahr (born 1956) is an American animator and experimental filmmaker known for his collage work since the 1970s. Style He uses an assortment of pop culture imagery from the 1950s to the 1970s to deconstruct the romantic promises of the pa ...

National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...

, 1990

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lew, Walter K. Living people American writers of Korean descent University of Miami faculty 20th-century American novelists 21st-century American novelists American novelists of Asian descent American male novelists 20th-century American poets 21st-century American poets American male poets 20th-century American male writers 21st-century American male writers Novelists from Florida Year of birth missing (living people)

Works

Awards

See also

References