Sun Yung Shin

"An emotion-filled collection." —Kirkus ReviewsA CCBC 2024 Choices for the Fiction for Young Adult category!Two teens take the stage and find their voice . . .A girl learns about her heritage and begins to find her community . . .A sister is haunted by the ghosts of loved ones lost . . .There is no universal adoption experience, and no two adoptees have the same story. This anthology for teens edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung contains a wide range of powerful, poignant, and evocative stories in a variety of genres.These tales from fifteen bestselling, acclaimed, and emerging adoptee authors genuinely and authentically reflect the complexity, breadth, and depth of adoptee experiences.This groundbreaking collection centers what it’s like growing up as an adoptee. These are stories by adoptees, for adoptees, reclaiming their own narratives. With stories by:Kelley BakerNicole ChungShannon GibneyMark OshiroMeMe CollierSusan Harness Meredith IrelandMariama J. LockingtonLisa NopachaiStefany ValentineMatthew SalessesLisa Wool-Rim SjöblomEric SmithJenny Heijun WillsSun Yung ShinForeword by Rebecca CarrollAfterword by JaeRan Kim, MSW, PhD

In this unique collaboration, four authors lyrically explore where they each come from--literally and metaphorically--as well as what unites all of us as humans. Richly layered illustrations connect past and present, making for an accessible and visually striking look at history, family, and identity. We come from stardust / our bodies made of ancient elements. / We come from single cells / evolving over billions of years. / We come from place, language, and spirit. / And each of us comes from story.

Sun Yung Shin calls her readers into the unknown now-future of the human species, an underworld museum of births, deaths, evolutions, and extinctions.Personal and environmental violations form the backdrop against which Sun Yung Shin examines questions of grievability, violence, and responsibility in The Wet Hex. Incorporating sources such as her own archival immigration documents, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Christopher Columbus’s journals, and traditional Korean burial rituals, Shin explores the ways that lives are weighed and bartered. Smashing the hierarchies of god and humanity, heaven and hell, in favor of indigenous Korean shamanism and animism, The Wet Hex layers an apocalyptic revision of nineteenth-century imagery of the sublime over the present, conjuring a reality at once beautiful and terrible.

Praise for Sun Yung Shin: Finalist for the Believer Poetry Award "[her] work reads like redactions, offering fragments to be explored, investigated and interrogated, making her reader equal partner in the creation of meaning."--Star Tribune Sun Yung Shin moves ideas--of identity (Korean, American, adoptee, mother, Catholic, Buddhist) and interest (mythology, science fiction, Sophocles)-- around like building blocks, forming and reforming new constructions of what it means to be at home. What is a cyborg but a hybrid creature of excess? A thing that exceeds the sum of its parts. A thing that has extended its powers, enhanced, even superpowered.

A tender look at a biracial child's frustration, anger, and, finally, acceptance about being "half and half." Cooper caught his reflection in the window. Brown hair, fair skin, and some freckles. Grandmother Park always said, "Such white skin " and Grandmother Daly always said, "What brown skin " One cousin always teased him about being "half and half." Cooper has had about enough of being half and half. And he's certainly had enough of Mr. Lee, the owner of his neighborhood grocery store, speaking to him in Korean even though Cooper can't keep up. Why can't things be simple? Why can't he just be one thing or the other? One moment in Mr. Lee's store changes everything for Cooper. Before long he realizes that the question of who we are is never simple-whether you talk about it in English or Korean. Kim Cogan's richly hued oil paintings perfectly complement this story of identity and intergenerational friendship, and author Sun Yung Shin brings her characters to life with tender, vivid prose.

"[These] accumulated poems [are] a smoldering tragedy, a heady descent, songs from a pit where what glints may be gems or the moon off snake scales."--Douglas Kearney Sun Yung Shin's poems animate the elements of the epic poem and Korean history across a dystopian dreamscape of fairy tale and folklore. Filled with pithy observations and striking lyrics, this collection explores alienation, moral isolation, and nationhood. Sun Yung Shin is the author of Skirt Full of Black, which won the 2008 Asian American Literary Award for poetry, and the children's book Cooper's Lesson, and is the co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption. Raised in Chicago, Illinois, Shin currently lives near Minneapolis, Minnesota, and frequently returns to Korea.