A $250,000 endowment at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center in support of Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander women's literature, in honor of Kim's late husband, Sung M. Lee.

 

CHUNGMI KIM, an award-winning Korean America playwright, poet, producer and director establishes a generous fund to support Asian, Asian American and Pacific Islander women's literature. Her uplifting and inclusive vision fills a gap in the recognition of Korean and Asian American writers, especially in genres of literature that include poetry, playwriting and mixed media literary endeavors.

 

Born in South Korea, Kim was graduated from Ewha Women's University in Seoul and received an MA in Theatre Arts from UCLA. Her plays include: The Call of Yama; I Beg Your Pardon, The Dandelion, and award-winning Comfort Women, which was a semi-finalist at the national Eugene O'Neil National Playwriting Conference. Through four decades, she has been recognized as a pioneering Asian American news producer on both Korea-based and Korean-American topics including Koreans in L.A. and untold stories of the Korean War.

 

Kim is widely anthologized in the United States and recognized by the Library of Congress as one of the few Korean American poets writing in English -- see, Chungmi, Selected Poems, and Glacier Lily, among her published works. UCLA's Asian American Studies Center also had published her poetry through its premier publication, Amerasia Journal. Her own poetry fills a gap in the recognition of Korean American writers, who, like Younghill Kang, Chang-Rae Lee, Min Jin Lee, and Susan Choi, have mostly been writers of fiction.

 

In establishing this literary fund, it is Chungmi Kim's passionate vision and commitment to the broader Asian community on both sides of the Pacific in her own work which she hopes that a young and diverse generation of Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander women writers can carry through to enrich American, Asian, and Pacific literatures as a whole.