Yearn Hong Choi, the founding president of the Korean Poets and Writers Group in the Washington area, has published one poetry book, Autumn Vocabularies (Writers' Workshop, 1990), and four poetry books in Korean.

His poems have appeared in the PoetryUSA, PEN International, Poets' West, dIS*orient, Mildred, Wyoming, Washington Post, World & I among others, and were translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil.

He edited Mother and Dove, Korean-American Poetry Anthology (Institute for Korean-American Culture, 1997), Surfacing Sadness: A Centennial of Korean-American Literature (Homa & Sekey Books, 2003) with Haengja Kim, Fragrance of Poetry: Korean-American Literature (Homa & Sekey, 2005), and An Empty House: Korean-American Poetry (Homa & Sekey, 2008).

He read his poems in the US Library of Congress in 1994 and 2003 as an invited poet. He published his poems in the Hyundae Munhak, the most prestigious literary magazine in Korea during his college days at Yonsei University.

He currently reviews the Korean literature for World Literature Today.

Moon of New York is Dr. Choi’s second poetry book in English after Autumn Vocabularies published in 1990 by Writers’ Workshop in Calcutta, India.

Poems in this volume are confessions of a Korean-American life from 1968 when he came to Indiana University as a foreign student to today, a retired college professor after long teaching years in the United States and Korea.

In his introduction, he confessed that his poems ” are basically his own translations from his poems in Korean into English. There may be some loss in translation, but there should remain some of the same values in the translated poems.” 86 poems from “My Sail” to “Vienna Waltz” reflect his life in verse.

Nostalgia to his home country is the heart of his poetry and the sustenance of his life. He shows beauty of the “dailyness of life”—small, sparkling moments that pass everyday, some paeans, some promises, and some pleas. He also shows sorrows of thevictims’ families of the Virginia Tech rampage in April 2007 and the tragedy of the on-going war against terror.