The Penguin Speakers Bureau

Nami Mun’s novel Miles From Nowhere became a national bestseller within its first month of publication and was short-listed for the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers. The story is about Joon, a Korean-American girl who leaves home at the age of thirteen and tries to eke out a life on the streets of 1980s New York City. The Boston Globe praised it as “vivid and mournful…impossible to forget” and The San Diego Union Tribune wrote that it was “one of the most vivid and haunting novels.” People reviewed it as “a searing debut…[Mun] writes with lovely precision, lending a hallucinatory beauty to the bleak world she has created.” The New York Times Book Review called Miles “spare, unsentimental, [and] fresh.”

Nami Mun was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up there and in the Bronx in New York City. She 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 her GED, she went on to get a BA from UC Berkeley, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award for fiction. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize and numerous fellowships, Mun’s stories have been published in the 2007 Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Iowa Review, Evergreen Review, Witness, and other journals, including Tin House, which named her an Emerging Voice of 2005. Named by Chicago magazine as “Best New Novelist,” Mun is currently an assistant professor of creative writing in Chicago.

Check out Nami Mun’s website here.