Miles from Nowhere

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synopsis

Joon is a young Korean immigrant living in the Bronx of the 1980s. Her parents have crumbled under the weight of her father's infidelity and mental illness has rendered her mother nearly catatonic. So Joon, at the age of thirteen, decides that she's better off on her own and sets out on a harrowing and sometimes tragic journey, exposing herself to all the pain and difficulty of a life lived on the margins. Joon's years on teh street take her from a homelss shelter to an escort club, through stuggles with addiction, to jobs selling newspapers and cosmetics, committing petty crimes and, finally, towards something resembling hope.

Nami Mun

was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up there and in the Bronx, New York. 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. A graduate of UC Berkeley, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award for fiction. She has received a Pushcart Prize, as well as scholarships and residencies from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Eastern Frontier, Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference, Tin House Writers’ Conference, and Key West Literary Seminar and her stories have been published widely. She lives and teaches Creative Writing in Chicago.