Yoojin Grace Wuertz was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States at age six. She holds a BA in English from Yale University and an MFA in fiction from New York University.
EVERYTHING BELONGS TO US is her debut novel, which was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and included on Kirkus Reviews’ Best Fiction of 2017. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Massachusetts Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She serves on the board of directors of the Brattleboro Literary Festival and has written a monthly advice/opinion column called Modern Grace for Best of Korea. She is the author of two picture books forthcoming from RISE x Penguin Workshop.
She lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with her family.
Photo by Nina Subin.
WRITING
- Mother Tongue: For a bilingual new mother, parenting becomes an experiment in identity—both her child’s and her own. (Essay at Guernica)
- Failure and Patience: Lessons from the Garden for Writers (Essay at Literary Hub)
- Book and film reviews for The Times Literary Supplement here:
- Death is a Small Price (review of the novel BEASTS OF A LITTLE LAND, by Juhea Kim)
- Found in Translation (review of the Film MINARI)
- Better Judges (review of two Yuko Tsushima novels)
- A Supernatural Hue (review of Han Kang’s THE WHITE BOOK)
AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
- Yoojin Grace Wuertz Takes on a Turbulent Moment in South Korean History (Interview with Andrea Arnold, Electric Literature)
- KUCI-FM radio interview with Marrie Stone
- podcast interview with Scott Jones at Give and Take
- podcast interview with Public Libraries Online
- Kirkus TV interview
- KBN (Korean language) TV interview
- KBTV (Korean language) TV interview Part 1, Part 2
- A Plus Book Club (Video on Facebook live)
AUTHOR FEATURES
- feature in 201 Magazine
- feature in Korea Daily (Korean language)