was born in 1960 in Bupyeong and grew up in Korea, and later in Germany and the United States. His autobiographical novel Memories of My Ghost Brother was named a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist and a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. His fiction and translations have been published in The New Yorker. A member of the editorial board for Harvard University’s AZALEA: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture from its inception until 2017, he is also the translator of the classic 17th-century Korean Buddhist novel The Nine Cloud Dream by Kim Man-jung published by Penguin Classics.

Fenkl received his A.B. in English from Vassar College and his M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis. He was a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea, where he studied literary translation and began a project collecting narrative folktales, which led to his book Korean Folktales. He was co-director of the Fulbright Summer Seminar in Korean History and Culture and he studied in the PhD Program in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, specializing in shamanism, narrative folklore, and ethnographic theory.

He has taught a wide array of creative writing, folklore, literature, and Asian and Asian American studies courses at Vassar College, Eastern Michigan University, and Sarah Lawrence College. He was also a core faculty member for the Milton Avery MFA program at Bard College and has taught at Yonsei University in Korea. He currently teaches creative writing and Asian studies courses at the State University of New York, New Paltz. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and daughter.