Introduction

Introduction Lucy Park (bio) The Sejong Cultural Society, a non-profit organization based in Chicago, has been promoting Korean culture and heritage in the United States since 2004. Its mission is to promote awareness and understanding of Korean culture and history in the United States. The organization strives to build bridges between Korea and the United States, encourage a deeper appreciation of Korean culture, and enrich American culture by introducing and sharing Korea's cultural heritage with younger generations. The Sejong Cultural Society uses Western media to present traditional Korean music, literature, and poetry to American audiences. Through literature and music competitions, the Sejong Cultural Society provides opportunities for Americans to explore and learn about Korean culture and cultural heritage. One such program is the Sejong Music Competition, which has been held annually since 2004 and is open to pre-college students residing in the US. The competition features categories for piano and violin, and participants are required to perform a repertoire that includes Korean traditional musical themes in addition to students' own choice repertoire. The Society has also been organizing the Sejong Writing Competition since 2006, which seeks to promote Korean literature and encourages participants to write sijo, a traditional Korean [End Page 295] poetry form. Participants are required to write an essay on a short fiction by Korean authors for adults and high school students, or on a Korean folktale if the participant is in 8th grade or younger. Participants are allowed to submit only one essay or one sijo. The number of participants has grown rapidly, reaching 1,200-1,900 submissions from the US and Canada over the past decade. In 2021, the Sejong International Sijo Competition was launched to introduce sijo poetry to a global audience and encourage the development of English-language sijo. The competition is open to the public as well as to poets from all over the world. The winning entries are published on the Sejong Cultural Society's website and receive cash prizes. To further promote the sijo, Korea's poetry form, the Sejong Cultural Society offers a variety of sijo education programs for English teachers in the US to teach their students how to write sijo poetry. By providing sijo teaching seminars, workshops, and other resources, we assist teachers in teaching sijo in their school classrooms. Most Americans learn and write haiku in elementary school. We hope Americans and Canadians learn sijo at school alongside other poetry forms such as sonnets, limericks, or haiku in their youth while they are most open to learning. In 2022, the Society released SIJO: Korea's Poetry Form, a comprehensive book on sijo. The book covers the historical content of sijo and provides examples of sijo poems written in English as well as translated sijo. It also offers practical guidance for those interested in teaching how to write sijo. The book was honored with the prestigious 2023 Franklin R. Buchanan Prize for outstanding curricular book by the Association for Asian Studies, a highly respected non-profit professional association with members consisting of scholars of Asian Studies worldwide. The annual sijo workshops for educators have been held in Chicago during the past twelve years. Since 2020, the sijo workshop has used a virtual meeting format. The online sijo course for educators is an asynchronous educational program [End Page 296] taking place over five weeks and has been offered seven times a year since 2017. Also, in-person sijo lectures have been presented at various programs in Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Dallas, and Atlanta since 2010. In addition, sijo lectures have been presented at professional organizations' annual meetings of National Council of Teachers of English and National Council for the Social Studies. These are national organizations of English or Social Studies teachers with over 5,000 members. Sijo has also been presented at the state level organizations' annual meetings in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio. Articles on English sijo writing or teaching sijo have also been published in numerous professional journals for English teachers and on internet sites frequented by English teachers or poets. The Sejong Cultural Society YouTube channel (YouTube.com/@SejongCulturalSociety) has numerous video recordings of sijo lectures, teaching sijo classes in high schools (in...