B-Dragon Suite: Reading and Conversation with Stine An, Stephon Lawrence, and Giaae Kwon

Stine An is a poet, translator, and performer based in New York City. She holds a BA in Literature from Harvard and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown, and has received fellowships and grants from The Poetry Project, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, Yaddo, ALTA, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her publications include Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (2025), Winter Night Rabbit Worries by Yoo Heekyung (2026), S_MMER CR_SH (2025), and Comet & Star written by Lee Juck and illustrated by Lee Jinhee (2024). Her debut poetry collection, B-Dragon Suite (2026), won the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize.

Stephon Lawrence is a Brooklyn poet interested in otherworldly poetics and the cultivation of emancipatory poetic spaces for felt sentiments that have been marginalized, displaced, or estranged from the dominant culture. u know how much i hate being alone in social situations// (Futurepoem, 2023) is her first full-length collection of poetry.

She is also a co-founder and CMO of Fan X Fan (Fan by Fan). Fan X Fan’s purpose is to build a new outlook on fandom that goes beyond the music industry itself and curates enjoyment at both a casual and super-fan level. Fan X Fan offers community and support to casual fans, super fans, and fans hoping to break into the music industry. This is done through offline events, artist, label, and brand integrations, and online community spaces. Thus far, Fan X Fan has collaborated with prominent K-Pop influencers, and curated events with leading NCT fanbase 127 Central, Z2 Comics, and renowned music producer Dem Jointz.

Giaae Kwon is a food and culture writer whose writing has appeared in Whetstone, Taste, Electric Literature, amongst others. She has been a K-pop fan since the days of H.O.T., and her first book, I’LL LOVE YOU FOREVER, is a collection of essays about K-pop that blend cultural criticism and personal writing. She divides her time between Brooklyn and Los Angeles.

B-Dragon Suite is a hybrid poetry collection by Stine An that remixes K-pop, experimental translation, sound art, and emoji poetics to explore Korean diasporic identity.

This debut book of poetry treats translation as play, performance, and embodied sound. Across seven interlinked sections, Stine An stages a fabulated K-pop universe, complete with boy band LIL BANG and girl group The Pink Blossoms, alongside lyric poems and prose meditations that code-switch between Korean and English. The book situates K-pop as both pleasure engine and cultural archive, asking how language survives colonial history, migration, and spectacle without resolving into easy consumption.