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Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nancy Jooyoun Kim is a graduate of UCLA and the University of Washington, Seattle. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, NPR/PRI's Selected Shorts, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Asian American Writers' Workshop's The Margins, The Offing and elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Last Story of Mina Lee, is available now from Park Row Books/HarperCollins.
On your nightstand now:
Two books of poetry, Look by Solmaz Sharif and Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, live on my nightstand. Permanently. It's almost as if I keep them there for an emergency. I'm reading Melissa Valentine's gorgeous debut memoir, The Names of All the Flowers, which explores the complexities of siblinghood and the personal and collective grief of Black families, as well as Octavia Butler's chillingly prescient Parable of the Sower. Two very powerful and important books.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I didn't grow up with many children's books in my house. We couldn't afford them. Most of them were from the library and I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't remember any of their titles. But as a teenager, the book that had the most profound and immediate impact on me was Willa Cather's My Ántonia, which takes place in Nebraska on the prairie--far from where I grew up outside of Koreatown. Yet it was the first time I cried while reading a book. I remember thinking, Now this is what a book can do.
Your top five authors:
James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison, Han Kang, Elena Ferrante.
These are authors whose entire works I'd like to finish before I die, and therefore, I must live long enough to read them all. Any author who makes you want to live longer is a legend in my mind.
Book you've faked reading:
I took an entire course on James Joyce's Ulysses in college, yet I never finished the book. I wrote essays about it and still got an A. I have read and loved his other (shorter) books, though. Honestly. I swear.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I love Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, a collection of essays that are so beautiful and mesmerizingly profound--a gift to all writers, and humans everywhere. I also love Luis Alberto Urrea's House of Broken Angels, a sprawling, quintessentially Southern California novel about a complex Mexican American family on the border, literally and metaphorically. A book written with such clarity, tenderness and heart.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I don't think I've ever bought a book for the cover, but if I can think of a book that I want to grab whenever I see the cover, it's Brit Bennett's The Mothers. I already have a copy (and I love it) but every time I see the cover, I want to buy it again?
Book you hid from your parents:
My mother doesn't read English, so I've never had to hide a single book from her. That might be the only advantage of having a parent who doesn't speak English. That and the fact that she can't read any of my work. Yet.
Book that changed your life:
I read Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories by Hisaye Yamamoto for an undergraduate course at a time when I was first trying to imagine a life for myself as a writer. Yamamoto's extraordinary stories explore complex topics, such as sexism and intergenerational conflict in families, with so much beauty, honesty and grace. Reading this book helped solidify my sense of being part of a community of Asian American storytellers, who wrote in even more difficult and demanding circumstances than our own.
Favorite line from a book:
"Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously.... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them." I remind myself of these words from Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work by the great Edwidge Danticat each time I face fear or uncertainty on the page which is more often than I'd like. I remind myself of the many places in this world, past and present, where the most marginalized, the most oppressed cannot speak, read or write freely, and in a sense, I'm obligated to continue my work as difficult as it is at times. I'm indebted to where I come from, the people who came before me, and the people who have fought and struggled for what rights I have now.
Five books you'll never part with:
Another Country by James Baldwin, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels (I know I'm cheating) and Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories by Hisaye Yamamoto. I could re-read these books over and over again.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I love it when I'm so immersed in a book that I want to literally throw it across the room when I get to a part that is so beautiful it hurts. I remember reading Pachinko by Min Jin Lee on an airplane so I couldn't hurl it anywhere (legally) but I would love to read that book again for the first time (privately) so I could express myself fully during some of its most perfect moments.