About Joe

Short bio:

Joe Milan Jr. is a second-generation Korean American and taught in South Korea for nine years. He's the author of the novel The All-American He teaches creative writing at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.

He's also a long time coffee snob, and a nascent coffee roaster.

Longer Bio

Joe Milan Jr. is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Hollins University, was the David T.K. Wong Creative Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia, UK, and a Black Mountain Institute and Barrick Ph.D. Fellow of Creative Writing at University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA. He has served as fiction editor at Witness and is an MFA graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He’s American with Korean ancestry and taught in Korea for nine years.

His work has appeared in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, F(r)iction, LA Review of Books, The Kyoto Journal, and more. Read them online.

He sometimes wonders if a vampire drank his blood, how much caffine they'd get out of him because he swills coffee. During his wandering years, he started learning to make better coffee with pour-overs, and from the sock looking things down in Guatamala. He started roasting for himself and his friends during his years in the midwest, where good coffee was as scarce as mountains, he started experimenting with roasting.

Media

This is what I sound like:

MPR News with Kerri Miller. “What it means to be All-American”
Author2Author with Bill Kenower. “Author2Author with Joe Milan, Jr.”
Live reading at the Bread Loaf Writers'Conference 2024, of parts of *The All-American*, also with the wonderful Jenny Johnson and Laura Marris

F.A.Q

Can you come and give a reading or a talk?

Drop me a line on the contact page. We'll see if we can work something out.

Where are some of your early work?

You can read some of my early stuff I compiled years ago in this little short story collection.

Coffee?

I love coffee, and am experimenting with writing something that I'm actively learning: how to roast, grind, pour and steep the perfect cup of joe.

How long did it take you to write The All-American

My whole life. Actual time banging on the keys was roughly a year, but there were many years between the first idea and the book going to print.

How much of The All-American is true?

It is fiction. I have never dreamed of being a running back, have never lived in a rural trailer park, have never been deported or conscripted or grappled with North Korean spies or any of the other stuff that happened in the book.

The only connections with reality is that, yes, some people (mostly adoptees to my knowledge and not step-children) have been deported from the US for not being citizens even though they were raised as Americans and had no control over their citizenship. Some Korean Americans have been pulled from planes and conscripted into the South Korean army.

But even those details were fictionalized heavily for the book.

What are you working on right now?

A secret…

Or maybe it’s a reimagining of “Rip Van Winkle,” where “Rip” is a Korean American grandmother succumbing to dementia. Her illness unleashes a life she had worked hard to forget: her life as a North Korean sleeper agent sent to the US. Believing she has been activated, she disappears into rural America to fulfill a long-forgotten mission. Told from her granddaughter’s perspective, Judy, a mixed-race Korean American woman living in Seattle, journeys to find her grandmother from the madness of the past. Melding the spy, immigrant, and political narrative genres, this project is about generational divides and the inherited scars of history.

Tell us about your teaching.

I teach creative writing and literature at Hollins University. Before, I've also taught at Waldorf University, at UNLV (as part of my PhD), The Catholic University of Korea, and other universities in South Korea.

In short, I started as a English as a foriegn language teacher and worked my way into teaching English and creative writing.

Can you comment on my manuscript?

Yes, if you join us over at Hollins University.

Who is your agent?

The wonderful Justin Brouckaert.

Who took all those awesome photos of you?

Taufik Bonaedy. Great guy, great eye. Check him out on Facebook.