Deborah Holland is a history teacher at D’Evelyn High School in the Denver metro area, and has also taught in Arizona and Venezuela. She currently teaches Eastern Civilizations, which includes a three-week unit on Korea, and AP Psychology. She first learned about sijo at the 2014 Korean Academy for Educators Seminar in Los Angeles and has taught it ever since. She has shared her enthusiasm of sijo by teaching other educators about the poetry at an NCTA workshop, a Korean War Legacy workshop, and at the National Council of Social Studies. Besides her work with the Sejong Cultural Society, she is a teacher fellow with Qatar Foundation International, which promotes education about the Middle East, as well as with the Engaging Eurasia Teacher Fellowship through Harvard.

Elizabeth Jorgensen is a writer and teacher. She has presented on sijo at a variety of conferences, including National Council of Teachers of English, Wisconsin State Reading Association, Wisconsin Writers Association, and elsewhere. Her articles on sijo have been published in English Journal, Azalea, Edutopia, Teachers & Writers Magazine, and Whale Road Review, among others. Jorgensen has received numerous awards, including Carroll University’s Graduate of the Last Decade, Arrowhead Union High School’s teacher of the year, and The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation Teacher Innovator Award. She was a Lucille S. Pooley Award winner (for Successful Techniques in Teaching Composition in the Schools of Wisconsin) and the Jarvis E. Bush winner from the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English. Learn more on her website: lizjorgensen.weebly.com

Tracy Kaminer is a retired English teacher who has taught at Marist School in Atlanta and Randolph-Macon Academy in Front Royal, Virginia. She specialized in teaching world literature in high school and at community colleges. She also taught ESL in Egypt and in the US. Now she and her husband live near Charlottesville, Virginia, and she works part time in undergraduate admissions for the University of Virginia.

Seong-Kon Kim is a professor emeritus of Seoul National University and a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. From 2012 to 2017, Kim was President of the Literary Translation Institute of Korea (a ministerial appointment with the Government of the Republic of Korea). On May 19, 2017, Kim received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the State University of New York "in recognition of the profound impact Professor Kim has had as a cultural and literary bridge between Korea and the United States.”
Professor Kim received his Ph.D. in English from SUNY/Buffalo under Professor Leslie A. Fiedler and studied comparative literature at Columbia University under Professor Edward W. Said. Professor Kim has received, among others, the SUNY/Buffalo Internationally Distinguished Alumni Award, CU Distinguished Alumnus Award, and the Fulbright Distinguished Alumnus Award.
He was the founding president of the Korean Association of Literature and Film from 1998 to 2001, and was president of the International Association of Comparative Korean Studies from 2001 to 2003, president of the Korean Association of Modern Fiction in English from 2004 to 2006, and president of the American Studies Association of Korea from 2007 to 2008. Kim was chairman of the Development and Promotion Council of the English Language and Literature Association of Korea from 2004 to 2005.
A prizewinning literary critic, Kim initiated the debate on literary postmodernism for the first time in Korea in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was also a pioneer in postcolonialism and cultural studies in Korea. His books on postmodernism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies have greatly influenced Korean writers and scholars. In 2008, Kim received the prestigious Kim Hwantae Award for Literary Criticism and in 2014 the Woo Ho Humanities Award.
Kim was the editor of literary journals such as Literature & Thought, 21st Century Literature, Contemporary World Literature and Korea Journal. In addition, Kim has been a regularly featured columnist for the Korea Herald since 2003. His Herald columns have frequently appeared in international media such as The Nation, The China Post, AsiaOne, Pakistan Observer, The Star, Yahoo! News, The Straits Times, The Kathmandu Post, The Statesman, The World Weekly and others. He served as co-editor of Korea Journal published by the Korean National Commission for UNESCO for 2015-2016. Kim was appointed as head judge of the prestigious Ho-am Prize Selection Committee, a Korean version of the Nobel Prize, and also the Segye Ilbo Literary Prize. Presently, he is a judge for two prestigious literary awards: the Yi Sang Literary Award and the Park Kyungni Literary Prize.

Wonsook Kim (Artist) was born in 1953 in Busan, Korea. She began drawing at a young age. Some of her earliest influences came from Korean folk stories and Christian Bible stories. She studied traditions of art in high school and college in Korea, and graduated with a B.S. and Master of Fine Arts degree from Illinois State University in 1978. After graduation, she moved to New York City to pursue a career as a painter and exhibiting artist.
Kim is renowned for the symbolic narratives reflected in her drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and books. Kim’s artworks are the result of her lifetime experiences in Korea and the United States, and have been shown in over sixty solo exhibitions around the world. She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Arts degree to recognize her artistic achievements during Illinois State University’s Founders Day on February 21, 2019.
Illinois State University’s College of Fine Arts and the School of Art was named the Wonsook Kim College of Fine Arts and the Wonsook Kim School of Art on September 12, 2019, in recognition of Kim’s generosity to her alma mater. She is married to Thomas Park Clement, a Korean-American adoptee, who is a medical device inventor and entrepreneur.

David McCann taught Korean literature at Harvard University until his retirement in 2014. He particularly enjoyed teaching his class Writing Asian Poetry, a creative writing class exploring the Classical Chinese, Japanese haiku, and Korean sijo forms for English-language poetry. His more recent books include Urban Temple, a collection of his English-language sijo poems from Bo-Leaf Press in 2010, published in a dual-language, Korean and English edition by Changbi Publishers in Seoul in 2012; Slipping Away, a Korean p’ansori-style narrative poem from Finishing Line Press, a chapbook published in 2013; and Same Bird, new and selected poems from Moon Pie Press in 2016. One of his haiku poems published in Acorn haiku journal received The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Award in 2014 and is included in Haiku 2015, from Modern Haiku Press. McCann translated the poems included in the collection The Temple of Words: An Anthology of Modern Korean Buddhist Poetry published by the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, Seoul, in 2017.

Chuck Newell is an English teacher at Notre Dame High School and an award-winning sijo poet. He has taught sijo writing for the past nine years. He first became interested in Korea and Korean poetry because of the many Korean students who have attended his high school over the years. He has attended many seminars about Korean culture and has even traveled to Korea. He has three adult children and lives with his wife and two cats in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His cats are often the subject of his poetry.

미국 일리노이즈에서 태어나고 자랐지만 한국인 부모님을 둔 엄연한 한국인이다. 스팬포드대 영문학과를 졸업한 후, 음식 칼럼니스트로 활발하게 활동했다. 1999년부터 출간된 작품 『널뛰는 아가씨(seesaw girl)』, 2000년에 출간된 『연싸움(The Kite Fighters)』에는 바로 한국의 옛이야기가 담겨 있다. 그리고 고려 청자 이야기를 담은 『사금라피 한 조각』으로 미국 최고의 아동문학상인 뉴베리상을 수상했다.

Lucy Park is one of the founding members of the Sejong Cultural Society, a non-profit organization founded in 2004. As Executive Director, she oversees all programs including the Sejong Music Competition, Sejong Writing Competition, and sijo education programs. She has been very active in teaching about sijo to teachers, students, and adults throughout the US for over ten years. She developed and compiled extensive reference materials on the basics of English sijo writing, sijo samples, and teaching sijo on the Sejong Cultural Society’s website and YouTube Channel. She pioneered the Sejong Cultural Society's Sijo and Music program, organizing concerts and commissioning composers and songwriters to write sijo music in a variety of musical genres.
Dr. Park has been a faculty member of the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine for over thirty years. She specializes in pediatric allergy, immunology, and pulmonology and received her M.D. from Seoul National University in Korea.

Mark Peterson (professor emeritus of Korean history, literature and language, Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages. Brigham Young University, Provo, UT) received B.A. in Asian Studies and Anthropology from Brigham Young University in 1971. He received his M.A. in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1987, both from Harvard University in the field of East Asian Languages and Civilization. Prior to coming to BYU in 1984 he was the director of the Fulbright program in Korea from 1978 to 1983. He has been the coordinator of the Asian Studies Program and was the director of the undergraduate programs in the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies. Dr. Peterson is a member of the Association for Asian Studies, where he was formerly the chair of the Korean Studies Committee; was also the book review editor for The Journal of Asian Studies for Korean Studies books. He is also a member of the Royal Asiatic Society, the International Association for Korean Language Education, the International Korean Literature Association, and the American Association of Korean Teachers. He served as past editor-in-chief for the Korea Journal, published by UNESCO in Korea, from 2015 to 2017. Currently he is working with a research center he founded called The Frog Outside the Well Research Center, which publishes an active YouTube channel by that name. He also writes a weekly column for The Korea Times.