Published Work
Erikka is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University's Mountainview MFA where she received the program's Safford Book Prize for best Fiction thesis and the Lynn Safford Memorial Prize. She has just completed the manuscript of her debut novel, American Pansori, a story about a daughter who must travel to Korea to understand the mother she thought she knew, and discover her inheritance isn't what she expected. The manuscript is complete and seeking representation.
Her writing explores how the novel form itself can hold the tension of two cultures embodied in one person; she's currently working on a short story that infuses Korean mythology with the Southern Gothic tradition.
Erikka teaches middle school English Language Arts and is pursuing a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction. She's interested in rooted cosmopolitanism as a pedagogical framework for the study of translated literature in the secondary English classroom.
On her night stand, you'll find Leif Enger, Han Kang, and John Steinbeck (and a hundred middle grade novels), and the poetry of Mary Oliver and Joy Harjo and Billy Collins. She's also enjoying short story collections by Bora Chung and Sally Wen Mao.
Erikka is a half-Korean American, and a classically-trained violinist and pianist. She lives somewhere in the Deep South with her husband, her son, a thirteen-year-old beagle mutt, and a two-year-old husky.