Nami Mun & Eula Biss

Nami Mun grew up in Seoul, South Korea and Bronx, New York. For her first book, Miles from Nowhere, she received a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, The Hopwood Award, and was a finalist for the Orange Prize for New Writers and the Asian American Literary Award. Miles from Nowhere was selected as Editors’ Choice and Top Ten First Novels by Booklist; Best Fiction of 2009 So Far by Amazon; and as an Indie Next Pick. Chicago Magazine named her Best New Novelist of 2009.

Previously, Nami has worked as an Avon Lady, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a waitress, an activities coordinator for a nursing home, and a criminal defense investigator. After earning a GED, she went on to get a BA in English from UC Berkeley, an MFA from University of Michigan, and has garnered fellowships from organizations such as Yaddo, MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and Tin House. In 2011 she became a US Delegate for a China/America Writers Exchange in Beijing. Her stories have been published in The New York Times, Granta, Tin House, The Iowa Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, and elsewhere. She currently teaches creative writing for Stanford and Northwestern universities.

Eula Biss is the author of four books: Having and Being Had (2020), On Immunity (2014), Notes from No Man’s Land (2009), and The Balloonists (2002). Her work has been translated into a dozen languages and has been recognized by a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library. As a 2023 National Fellow at New America, she is at work on a collection of essays about how private property has shaped our world.

For the past twenty years, Biss has taught writing in large lecture halls and small community bookstores, at public elementary schools and private universities. She developed a commitment to progressive education at Hampshire College, where she studied creative writing and visual art before earning an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She currently teaches nonfiction for the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is a founding editor of Essay Press and a member of the Penny Collective. She lives a mile from Lake Michigan, where she swims in sun and shadow.