Heinz Insu Fenkl
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Heinz Insu Fenkl is an author, editor, translator, and mythology scholar.
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[edit] Academic work
Fenkl is the director of the Creative Writing Program at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is also the director of ISIS: The Interstitial Studies Institute at SUNY, New Paltz.
Before his appointment to his current position at SUNY, he taught a range of courses at Vassar, Bard, Eastern Michigan University, Sarah Lawrence, and Yonsei University (Korea), including Asian/American Folk Traditions, East Asian Folklore, Korean Literature, Asian American Literature, and Native American Literature, in addition to Creative Writing.
[edit] Works
His fiction includes Memories of My Ghost Brother, an autobiographical, Interstitial novel about growing up in Korea as a bi-racial child in the 1960s. On the strength of this book he was named a Barnes and Noble "Great New Writer" and PEN/Hemingway Award finalist in 1997. His second novel, Shadows Bend (a collaborative work, published under a pseudonym) was an innovative, dark 'road novel' about H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. He has also published short fiction in a variety of journals and magazines, as well as numerous articles on folklore and myth.
He has published translations of Korean fiction and folklore, and is co-editor of Kori: The Beacon Anthology of Korean American Literature. Currently he is at work on a sequel to Memories of My Ghost Brother, and on a volume of Korean myths, legends, and folk tales: Old, Old Days When Tigers Smoked Tobacco Pipes. He also writes regular columns on mythic topics for Realms of Fantasy magazine and the Endicott Studio Journal of Mythic Arts.
[edit] Personal
Graduating from Vassar College, he studied folklore and shamanism as a Fulbright Scholar in Korea and dream research under a grant from the University of California.
Heinz was raised in Korea and (in his later years) Germany and the United States. Heinz lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, writer and artist Anne B. Dalton, and their daughter Isabella Myong-wol.
