David McCann served in the first Peace Corps group to go to Korea, ROK, 1966-68, then received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. He taught Classical Japanese language and literature at Cornell University, and then Korean literature at Cornell and at Harvard. He retired in 2014.
David has published 32 books. His translations of poems by individual Korean poets have been published by Columbia University Press, Princeton University Press, Quarterly Review of Literature, and other presses. He translated the poems for The Temple of Words, An Anthology of Modern Korea Buddhist Poetry published in 2017 by the Jogye Buddhist Temple Order. Eleven books of his own poems have been published, including a dual-language edition of his sijo poems, Urban Temple.