Kim-Russell is a biracial Korean-American. She began formally studying Korean in university and worked for a Korean studies journal in Seoul, editing translation. While working as an editor, she entered The Korea Times' literature translation contest in 2005 and won for poetry, and won the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea) contest for new translators in 2007.[4] As a translator, she has taught literary translation courses at Ewha Womans University's Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, LTI Korea, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and served as a mentor for the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program.[5] She is a member of the translation collective Smoking Tigers, whose name is derived from the stock phrase of Korean folktales 호랑이 담배 피우던 시절에 (Long, long ago, back when tigers used to smoke tobacco), for Korean-to-English translators, which includes authors and translators such as Sung Ryu, Stella Kim, Soje, and Deborah Smith.[6]
Kim-Russell has often commented on challenges in Korean translation, namely of certain untranslatable words and concepts in Korea, such as han, dapdaphada (a physical sensation of suffocation caused by feeling frustrated or unable to speak or act freely), and eogulhada (to feel that something is unfair or undeserved), and a perception of 'vagueness' in Korean writing because of the relatively sparse nature of Korean compared to English as a topic-prominent language with minimal pronouns.[7][8] Her essays on topics including mixed-race Koreans, LGBTQ representation in Korean film, and North Korea have been published by a variety of publications.[9][10]
