Crystal Hana Kim is the author of If You Leave Me, which was a Booklist Editor’s Choice title, Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen publications. A 2022 recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, a 2022 Creative Capital Award Finalist, a 2021 Jerome Hill Artist Finalist, and a 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize winner, her work has been published in Elle Magazine, The Paris Review, Glamour Magazine, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her second novel, The Stone Home, is forthcoming from William Morrow / HarperCollins in 2024. Crystal is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor at Queens College and a contributing editor at Apogee Journal.
Crystal Hana Kim’s If You Leave Me is an emotionally riveting debut novel about war, family, and love—the unforgettable saga of refugees in Korea and the heartbreaking choices they’re forced to make in the years surrounding the civil war that still haunts us today. Described as “stunning” by The Washington Post and “beautifully layered as it is devastating” by Elle Magazine, If You Leave Me examines the history of The Korean War and its ramifications across generations through a multi-voiced, multilayered narrative that traverses five poetic, nuanced narrators who hunger for choice and change in a tumultuous and modernizing Korea.