PEN Tulsa, Magic City Books, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship are teaming up to welcome Jennifer Hope Choi for a free event on Thursday, May 22 to celebrate her book, The Wanderer’s Curse.
Jennifer Hope Choi will be in conversation with Christina Chaey. Christina is a recipe developer, writer, and cook. She shares recipes and writes about cooking and mental health in her newsletter, Gentle Foods, and was the senior food editor at Bon Appétit. We will also have light bites by Christina inspired by the book at the event.
The Wanderer’s Curse will be published by W. W. Norton & Company on May 6, 2025 and will be available for sale at Magic City Books. Purchase a copy online >>
This event is free and open to the public, and registration is required.
About The Wanderer’s Curse
When Jennifer Hope Choi first stumbled upon the “curse” known as yeokmasal–an allegedly inheritable affliction causing one to roam farther and farther from home–she immediately consulted her mother. “Oh yeah,” Umma quipped. “I have that.” Technically this wasn’t a revelation. Since 2007, the no-nonsense open-heart surgery nurse had moved suddenly from the Golden State to the Last Frontier, shuttling over the next decade through seven states.
For much of her adulthood, Choi had fancied herself nothing like her immigrant mother, late-blooming vagabond spirit and all–until life in Brooklyn imploded, spurring her to relocate to South Carolina and reckon with startling truths. Artmaking had left her in debt, single, and jobless. Questions hovered, gathering ragged like fractus clouds: Was it time to give up writing? Would she ever have a place of her own to call home? Or was she doomed to bunk up with Umma in the Deep South indefinitely?
This probing memoir follows Choi through her many former homes, from a crumbling Chinatown tenement to a haunted museum in Georgia. Connections emerge, between her curious trajectory and idiosyncratic Korean identity narratives: a mystical Korean dog breed, pro golfers, modern Korean cults, the four pillars of destiny, and Korean American art. One question lingers throughout her search: What might be gained from living in residence with uncertainty?
Told with whip-smart sensibility, The Wanderer’s Curse is an electric mother-daughter story, exploring ideas of belonging, self-determination, and possibility, leaving readers to wonder what we take with us generation to generation, what we wish we could leave behind, and how we move on.
Jennifer Hope Choi is the recipient of the 2020-2022 Tulsa Artist Fellowship, the Carson McCullers Center’s Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship, the BuzzFeed Emerging Writer Fellowship, and the AHL Foundation’s inaugural Wolhee Choe Art Writers Grant. She is also a Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholar and an Aspen Words fellow. She has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing and A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, The American Scholar, Lucky Peach, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. Her debut, THE WANDERER’S CURSE, will be published by W. W. Norton & Company. She is a National Magazine Award-nominated Senior Editor at Bon Appétit.
Christina Chaey is a Brooklyn-based food writer, recipe developer, recovering perfectionist, and soon-to-be cookbook author. Her friends call her Chaey (and you can, too). Her decade-long career in food has so far included gigs as a magazine editor, line cook, and test kitchen recipe developer, but her favorite role is home cook. She often has her nose buried in one of her more than 120 cookbooks, count grocery shopping among her top-three hobbies, and really, really loves cooking dinner for people she loves.