Margaret Rhee is a poet, scholar and media artist. Her debut poetry collection, Love, Robot was published in 2017 and has been named a 2017 Best Book of Poetry by Entropy Magazine and awarded a 2018 Elgin Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association and the 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry by the Asian American Studies Association. Other works in progress or completed include The Watermelon Woman for the Queer Film Classics Series under contract at McGill University Press, Poetry Machines, a collection of lyrical essays on poetry and technology under contract at Duke University Press, and How We Became Human: Race, Robots, and the Asian American Body, a scholarly study of robots, media and race which is under review.

As a media artist, her project The Kimchi Poetry Machine is exhibited at the Electronic Literature Review Volume III and included in the anthology Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change (Routledge, 2022). From 2008 - 2018, with collaborators from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, she co-lead the participatory project From the Center which focused on digital storytelling, women of color, and HIV/AIDS education in the San Francisco Jail. Rhee is an assistant professor at The New School in the School of Media Studies, and teaches in the Creative Writing MFA.

INSIGHT

Blue Collar/White Collar

By MARGARET RHEE

When I was five, my father taught me the meaning of work. “Don’t be blue collar,” he said tugging desperately at the thick collar of his mechanic’s work shirt. “Be white collar.”