Yaerim Gen Kwon is a prose writer and literary translator from Seoul, South Korea. Her writing appears in Cream City Review, Reed Magazine, Al Jazeera, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Chicago, Illinois, where she is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Illinois Chicago. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University Bloomington, where she received the 2024 Earle J. S. Ho Award for the Teaching of Creative Writing and served as the Editor-in-Chief for Indiana Review.
Her short story won first prize for Literature in 2022, and her novel chapter received the Hegarty Award in 2023, both from the National Society of Arts & Letters Competition. She has received scholarships and fellowships from Bread Loaf, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the American Literary Translators Association, and Carleton College, among others. A member of the Third Coast Translators Collective in Chicago, she previously worked in media across Seoul, San Francisco, and Rabat. She is currently working on her first novel and her first full-length novel translation.