2016 Jack Straw Writer EJ Koh found her calling as a poet at the very end of her college experience, after years of acting as her own guardian while her parents worked in Korea. She talks about her unusual adolescence and the sudden realization that she was a poet with program curator Karen Finneyfrock. “Everyone’s like ‘What’s happening to you? What’s poetry doing to you?’ And then I had to stop and think about it, and I said ‘I think it’s making me a better person, I think that’s what’s happening.’”

Music by Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.