Counterpath, Denver CO
Brown University, Providence RI
Catherine Kim is a Korean Canadian writer studying in the United States. Her work can be found in Black Warrior Review, Fairy Tale Review, Nat. Brut, the Transcendent series, the Nameless Woman anthology, and elsewhere. Her writing has been awarded the Frances Mason Harris '26 Prize, shortlisted for the Sunburst Award, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She earned an MFA at Brown University and is now a PhD student at the University of Denver, where she is a Prose Editor for Denver Quarterly.
“...I envisioned a white sheet descending from heaven by its four corners full of winged creatures finally at rest from their long flight through history, presented to me now in an unadorned list of these casualties of the Anthropocene...”
The Fox Marble
Fairy Tale Review, Rainbow Issue (2023)
“...behold the creatures of the earth and the memory of salt, which is my warmth forever trapped in the teeth of your thumb, and do not mind the empty sky, which is the surface of the marble from inside it. Won’t you wait for me my thousand days of hunger for you?”
The Librarians
Black Warrior Review, Short Boyfriend (2023)
“I looked back to your book, traced the letters as they fled down the spine, certain I’d find you inside. Perhaps you’ve always haunted my dreams, overwriting their contents at the limits of my imagination.”
“Nabi had claimed the running water was a looking glass to countless other worlds and times, and they might catch glimpses of their other selves in the shimmers on the surface. Look there, she’d beckoned, and reached out to touch the water, where she said she could see Yeou as a woman, looking back at her.”
Epitaphs: Two Poems
Hypocrite Reader, Issue 98: Teeth (July 2021)
Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net
“Perhaps, bereft as I was of his last words, I thought I could find the heart of him in the organ itself, and that even in the embrace of another’s hands, he would reveal himself to me and so immortalize himself in memory.”
“It flows from East to West, the way old smoke might rise from the lungs to haunt the throat, or how he might follow the arch of her unadorned finger with the point of his thumb, or how the tip of the scalpel might have traveled over his neck, with his body parallel to the divide.”
The Shapeshifters
Bloom, Spring 2021
“The stranger must have known this, as she settled back into alignment with Yeou’s eyes and kept her otherworldly secrets to herself, which meant the unfamiliarity of Yeou’s small and naked wrists remained squirming in the nest of her skull, feathers wet with grey matter...”
“She knows how this goes, better than any girl should: the bite of something sharp, a flash of pain, the flush of adrenaline coursing through her blood. Like breaking down a gate to a castle from the inside...”
“A dead woman taught the orphan how to craft herself a magic boat using lumber felled from her overgrowth. And she guided the girl through the steps of a matricide: how to dismember her limbs with quick strokes, peel the bark from her flesh with her fingers, and pull the splinters out of her nail beds by sucking sharply through her teeth...”
Collected Stories
Trans Women Writers Collective, Booklet #0 (2018)
“You shiver as if you’ve stepped through your own ghost. Never does the air starve in your lungs as it does when she watches you like this. With the weight of her against yourself, and her crooked finger in your mouth. Your eyes are laughing tears.”
Fidelity
An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color,
ed. Ellyn Peña & Jamie Berrout (2016)
Republished in Nameless Woman (2018)
“Falling asleep to the tune of whispers, clattering cups, insects and dogs, and creaking wood. There are enough of these little cuts to make the absence of that place feel like a more permanent wound, a real place outside my little world that I have touched and lost...”
Untitled Poems
Trinity Review, CXXV (2013)
“iron carriages descending down god in the dark is to be / found his pieces are they left remains in countered earth / in between the parts of his withered feet did he ever kiss / his toes...”