Nicole Chung

Nicole Chung is a Korean American author and editor whose memoir All You Can Ever Know, published in 2018, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and is widely regarded as one of the finest memoirs about transracial adoption in American literature. Born in Oregon in 1981, Chung was adopted as an infant by a white family in a small Oregon town and grew up as one of the few Asian Americans in her community, navigating questions of identity and belonging that her loving but racially inexperienced family was ill-equipped to help her answer.

Chung studied journalism and has built a career as a writer and editor whose work centers on identity, race, family, and health. She served as editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine and has been a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Her essays and reported pieces have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, Slate, and many other publications.

All You Can Ever Know recounts her decision to search for and find her biological family, a search that became simultaneously more urgent when she became pregnant with her first child and wanted to know her medical and cultural heritage. The memoir is a searching, compassionate examination of the ethics and emotional complexity of transracial adoption, told without sentimentality or simple answers. It asks what it means to belong to a family, and whether identity can be chosen as much as inherited.

Her second memoir, A Living Remedy (2023), chronicles the illness and death of both her adoptive parents against the backdrop of American healthcare inequality and grief. Chung is recognized as one of the most thoughtful voices writing about family, identity, and the limits of the American promise.