PEN Presents: K-Lit – A Conversation with Korean-American Authors on the K-Zeitgeist

In partnership with Lincoln Center, PEN America convenes a roster of leading NYC-based Korean-American writers and artists for a conversation exploring what fuels their creative practice, squaring their relationship with South Korea’s growing global cultural influence, and the role that Korean-American traditions and history have on their body of work. Featuring New York Times bestselling authors Min Jin Lee (Pachinko, Free Food for Millionaires), Eric Kim (Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home), Nicole Chung (A Living Remedy, All You Can Ever Know), Mary H.K. Choi (Yolk, Permanent Record) and journalist and event moderator Hannah Bae, the discussion will also examine the ways in which the Korean diaspora and the broader Asian-American community have responded to the current wave of anti-Asian-American racism and violence. Over the last 100 years, PEN America has mobilized countless writers, activists, and public intellectuals in the fight to defend free expression and the open exchange of ideas.

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Participants

Hannah Bae is a Korean American freelance journalist, nonfiction writer and illustrator who is at work on a memoir about family estrangement and mental illness. She is the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a 2021 and 2022 Peter Taylor Fellow for The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. You can find her work in anthologies such as Our Red Book: Intimate Histories of Periods, Growing & Changing and (Don’t) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation About Mental Health and online at Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, Catapult, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle and other outlets. You can connect with her at @hanbae on Twitter and @hannahbae on Instagram.

Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her writing has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, One Story, The New York Times Book Review, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2019, she was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame. She is a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College and serves as a trustee of PEN America and a director of the Authors Guild. She is at work on her third novel, American Hagwon and a nonfiction work, Name Recognition.

Nicole Chung is the author of the national bestseller All You Can Ever Know. Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, the Washington Post, TIME, and many other outlets, All You Can Ever Know was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a semifinalist for the PEN Open Book Award, an Indies Choice Honor Book, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Chung’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, TIME, GQ, Slate, and the Guardian. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she now lives in the Washington, DC, area.

Mary H.K. Choi is the New York Times bestselling author of Emergency Contact, Permanent Record and Yolk. Her writing has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times, New York and GQ. Previously, she was a culture correspondent for Vice News and has written comic books for Marvel and DC. She is currently developing Permanent Record for a feature film and Yolk for TV. She lives in New York City. Learn more about her at choitotheworld.com and @choitotheworld on Twitter and Instagram.

Eric Kim is a New York Times staff writer born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and the author of Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home (Clarkson Potter, 2022). He was a digital manager at Food Network and a senior editor at Food52, where he amassed a devoted readership for his “Table for One” column. He now hosts regular videos on NYT Cooking’s YouTube channel and writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine. A former contributing editor at Saveur, Eric taught writing and literature at Columbia University, and his work has been featured in The Washington Post, Bon Appétit, and Food & Wine. He lives with his rescue pup, Quentin Compson, in New York City.