Longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

Born in Korea, raised in the American South, and trying her best to survive British academia, SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, scholar, and daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her, intimate accounts of immigration, and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between generations―especially within the Asian diaspora in the West―as she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown. Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language, Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean, her mother tongue, and draws inspiration from K-dramas and writers who sustain her, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Don Mee Choi, Toni Morrison, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

 

This Part Is Silent is a testament—a wounded work that explores academic precarity, microaggressions, and the works of Yusef Komunyakaa and Kim Hyesoon, written by a young Korean American writer trying to survive in Manchester’s Chinatown, higher education, and contemporary racial discourse. Kim’s vulnerable text takes autofiction in a turn that’s at once multicultural, metatextual, and multilingual.’ — Ken Chen

And Other Stories, 2025.