| Ishle Park |
 Ishle Yi Park is a NYFA fiction grant recipient has been published in over 20 anthologies including The Beacon Best 2001 and Best American Poetry of 2003. She is the first Korean American woman to compete in the National Poetry Slam. She was a featured artist on HBO's Def Poetry Jam. Ishle currently works as a writer-in-residence for Youth Speaks in Oakland, California. Long Bio Ishle Yi Park is a writer, educator and activist who was born to Korean immigrant parents in New York in 1977. She received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and has taught creative writing in elementary schools, junior high schools, high schools, colleges, prisons, and community centers throughout New York and San Francisco. She worked as Arts-In-Education Director of the Asian American Writers� Workshop, and was a poetry editor for Tribes Magazine and The Asian Pacific American Journal. She helped nurture and curate (re)collection, the only Asian-American open mic series in New York. A recipient of a fiction grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Gregory Millard Fellow, her work has appeared nationally in over 20 publications including New American Writing, Slam, The Cream City Review, The NuyorAsian Anthology,Beacon Best 2001, and the forthcoming Best American Poetry 2003, edited by Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa. Her first book, called The Temperature of this Water, will be published with Kaya Press in spring 2003. Ishle has performed at colleges and venues in the United States, Cuba and Korea as a solo artist, and as part of a pan Asian collective called Feedback. Winner of the "best love poem in fire engine red" at the Nuyorican�s Glam Slam, Loudpoet of the Year and Grand Slam Champion (2000) of Bar 13, and she is the first Korean American woman ever to compete and feature on the finals stage at the National Poetry Slam. She has been written about in The Economist, Asianweek, The Black Scholar Review, and The San Francisco Guardian, and has aired nationally on Gotham TV and HBO�s Def Poetry Jam. Ishle Yi Park currently lives in Oakland, and works as the California Arts Council Writer-In-Residence at the Youth Speaks Literary Arts Center. |