JIhyun Yun
GOOD CREATURE (Knopf BFYR, March 2027)
AND THE RIVER DRAGS HER DOWN (PRH / Knopf BFYR, 2025)
SOME ARE ALWAYS HUNGRY (Univ of Nebraska Press, 2020)
Jihyun Yun is a Korean American writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. A Fulbright research fellow, her poetry collection Some Are Always Hungry was the recipient of the 2019 Prairie Schooner prize and was published by University of Nebraska Press in fall of 2020. Her work has been published or anthologized in Best New Poets, Narrative Magazine, Ninth Letter and elsewhere. She currently lives in Ann Arbor.
Instagram / Twitter / www.JihyunYun.com / Represented by Serene Hakim and Annie Hwang
Books BY JIHYUN YUN
GOOD CREATURE (Knopf BFYR, March 2027)
From the USA Today bestselling author of And the River Drags Her Down comes a haunting, eerie gothic tale steeped in Korean folklore. A teen girl who can see the dead accidentally binds herself to a ghost groom and unleashes something far darker onto her college campus.
“Taut and poetic. A terrifying ghost story that will possess you from start to finish. Yun’s sinister prose marries the supernatural terror of Korean folklore with modern gothic dread . . . Utterly haunting.”—Keala Kendall, New York Times bestselling author of That Which Feeds Us
Dragged under by the Pacific Ocean, she should have never surfaced again. But she did—and she returned with a curse. Ever since that fateful day, Lamb has been able to see the dead as they truly are: some of them whole and peaceful, others vividly gruesome. Haunted, Lamb could no longer be the good, docile daughter her parents expected of her.
Years later, cut off from her family, Lamb is running a covert posthumous marriage scheme that delivers closure to grieving Korean families and easy money into her pocket to pay for college. But when the family of a ghost bride abruptly backs out of a marriage ceremony, Lamb is left without a bride and does the unthinkable, offering her own image to the altar.
Not only does Lamb bind herself to Felix Yoo, the ghost groom, but unbeknownst to her, something else slithers through—a faceless, wretched thing desperate to reach Lamb by any means necessary . . .
“Rich with dark horror and achingly beautiful, it will haunt you.”—Melinda Salisbury, author of Local Gods
AND THE RIVER DRAGS HER DOWN (PRH / Knopf BFYR, 2025)
The girls of the Han family are gifted with an unusual ability: when they bury bones in soil, they can regrow the bodies it was sourced from. When her elder sister Mirae drowns under mysterious circumstances, seventeen-year-old Soojin Han cannot resist the impulse to resurrect her via a saved milk-tooth. At first, the reunion is perfect. Her sister Mirae is as kind as ever and— together with their childhood friend Mark Moon, the first person in town to discover the Han Family secret— they cobble together a routine that mirrors a heavily idealized past.
To resurrected Mirae Han, however, things are less rosy. She can’t remember her own name. She is always ravenously hungry, and not allowed to be seen in town, she is forced to slink around in the dead of night like the malignant water ghost she fears she will become. When the carefully designed façade of normalcy begins to disintegrate, culminating in a series of unusual deaths in their idyllic all-American resort town, Soojin is forced to grapple with the reality that the sister she brought back is not the one she knew.
SOME ARE ALWAYS HUNGRY (Univ of Nebraska Press, 2020)
Some Are Always Hungry chronicles a family’s wartime survival, immigration, and heirloom trauma through the lens of food, or the lack thereof. Through the vehicle of recipe, butchery, and dinner table poems, the collection negotiates the myriad ways diasporic communities comfort and name themselves in other nations, as well as the ways cuisine is inextricably linked to occupation, transmission, and survival. Dwelling on the personal as much as the historical, Some Are Always Hungry traces the lineage of the speaker’s place in history and diaspora through mythmaking and cooking, which is to say, conjuring.
Praise:
“In this visceral yet compassionate inquiry into what makes us alive, Yun shows us how hope can be fashioned out of the desire to speak on and through atrocities. This book is one of those rare collections that stuns me back to my own life, somehow renewed, somehow better, kinder, and less alone.”—Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds
“Image by clear-eyed image, sound by tightly wrought sound, the poems in Some Are Always Hungry are a thundering revelation. At once a reckoning with immigration and historical trauma and rooted in the sensorial world, these poems are timeless and ongoing. Here is both the fever and the scar it leaves, the female body and the lineage of power, hunger, and desire, what cannot be forgotten and what keeps us alive despite it all; here is a poet staking her undeniable claim on the world.”—Ada Limón, author of The Carrying
“Jihyun Yun’s captivating poems hold a wise and magnetic energy at the center of each page, one rarely seen in a first book. This is a poet of grace and elemental blood-wisdom who will pull you to unexpected terrains where food is a vehicle not just to explore lineage and ancestors but to navigate the winding roads of the present and the future. . . . Some Are Always Hungry is a most magnificent and memorable debut from a deeply talented poet I’m certain we’ll be turning to again and again.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonder