Choe Jeongrye

Choe Jeongrye (1955 – 16 January 2021) was a modern South Korean poet.

Choe Jeongrye was born in 1955 in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi-do.

She graduated with a doctorate degree in Korean poetry from Korea University.

She participated in the (International Writing Program) (IWP) as a poet at University of Iowa in 2006 and stayed one year at University of California, Berkeley as a visiting writer in 2009.

Her poems have been printed in Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poets, Iowa Review, Text Journal, World Literature Today, and various Korean and Japanese literary magazines.

An English-language collection, Instances (which she co-translated), was published in 2011.

Choe was a lecturer at Korea University.

She died in 2021 from cerebral hemorrhage after having been diagnosed a year earlier with hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, a rare blood disease.

Many of Choe's poems were about time and memory.

She typically used fragments of time and memory as tools for looking into others and the world, or for identifying herself.

What ultimately emerged from her exploration of fragmented memories and chaos of time was the sense of emptiness and loneliness: the core of existence.

Choe's poetic language was straightforward and condensed.

She used simple language, subverting plain words to make them unfamiliar and strange.

In Instances, her work is described as having:

Choe received several awards for her writing, including the Baekseok Literature Prize, Midang Literary Award, and Ojangwhan Literature Prize.