Cheon Yanghui was born in Busan, Keishōnan-dō, Korea, Empire of Japan on January 21, 1942 as the youngest of seven children.
She often wrote and recited poems, despite being unable to participate in art festivals due to administrative issues at her school.
After Cheon Yanghui married in 1969, she stopped writing and publishing poetry, although she eventually divorced her husband and became the manager of a dressmaker's shop.
While many of Cheon Yanghui's earlier works reflect on an isolated self, more of her later poems - beginning with her most well-known poetry collection Sorghum Field of the Heart (마음의 수수밭, 1994) - focus more on the everyday hardships, sorrows, and frustrations of living a more "typical" life.
[2] More recent publications, such as Too Many Mouths (너무 많은 입, 2005), further elaborate on her perspective of what it means to write and publish poetry in modern society.