The 2024 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation

Congratulations to the winners and honorable mentions for the 2024 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, judged by Kristin Dykstra.

2024 Winner:
Cindy Juyoung Ok's translations of poems by Kim Hyesoon

Honorable Mentions:
“The Missing” by Megan Baxter
“Couples therapy” by Dylan Fisher

Kristin Dykstra, on the winner: 
Kim Hyesoon makes poems that “seep and / stand up again and lie down again,” announcing exactly how they are part of the chemical workings of time. Kim Hyesoon – or so it is said – makes poetry from no model. Kim Hyesoon presents poems made soft under acid colorless skies, blurring blackbirds into new matters of c • r • o • w • c • r • o • w. This work in translation is a fine reminder that acid-producing bacteria permeates the globe. The English-language renditions snap and haze language through shatters of earth and body, in keeping with Hyesoon's challenge; they resynthesize fallout from her words into alt-selves speaking some parts human, some parts bird.

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward from the Yale Series of Younger Poets, translator of The Hell of That Star from the Wesleyan Poetry Series, and an assistant English professor at UC Davis. 

Kim Hyesoon has published fourteen poetry collections in Korean that have been translated into several languages. A winner of the Griffin Prize, the Ho-Am Prize, and the Midang Award, she was a creative writing professor at Seoul Institute of the Arts for many years and lives in Seoul.

The Gulf Coast Prize in Translation was founded by the Editors in 2014. The winner receives $1,000 and publication in the print edition of Gulf Coast. Honorable mentions receive $250. All entries will be considered for publication as GC Online Exclusives. 

Kristin Dykstra

Kristin Dykstra

Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, and scholar. She is the author of the prose poetry collection, Dissonance, winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize (forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press, 2025). Veliz Books published her translation of Amanda Berenguer’s collection, The Lady of Elche (2023), and the same press will bring out her translation of The Star-Spangled Brand, by Marcelo Morales, in 2025. Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph, by Reina María Rodríguez, winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and finalist for the National Translation Award. Her translation of 13 lunas 13, by Tina Escaja, won a 2023 Gold Medal from the International Latino Book Awards program. Dykstra has translated many other books, by Juan Carlos Flores, Rito Ramón Aroche, Ángel Escobar, and Omar Pérez; as well as additional works by Morales, Berenguer, and Rodríguez. She coedited the cross-cultural magazine Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas Nueva escritura de las Américas, issues 7–16, with Roberto Tejada and Gabriel Bernal Granados. She held a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literary Translation. Dykstra’s most recent scholarly chapter, examining Cuban poetry 1959–1989, appears in The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature (eds. Vicky Unruh and Jacqueline Loss, 2024).