repped Jackie Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists (Toronto) * publicity Claire Pokorchak, Penguin Random House Canada (Toronto)

ABOUT

I was born in Seoul, South Korea and was adopted and raised in a white family in a small(ish) town in Southern-Ontario, Canada. This experience offered a unique perspective on race, ethnicity, and identity. I grew up with a younger sister who was not adopted.

In my late teens, I left for Toronto where I earned a B.A. in journalism. I also have a B.A. in English Literature. I moved around a lot during graduate school until I completed an M.A., and later, a Ph.D. also in English lit.

In 2008 I made contact with my Korean mother and the following summer, I reunited with my family in Asia. I understand how uncommon it is for Korean adoptees of my generation to reconnect with lost family, so even though communication is difficult between us, I’m so thankful for our relationship.

I’ve lived, studied, and worked in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Northern California, and Seoul. Nowadays I live with my family in Manitoba. I teach in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg.

My Canadian grandparents all lived in the Niagara-region of Southern Ontario—famous for its vineyards. My Korean grandparents were grape farmers in the small town of Gimcheon a few hours from Seoul.

Writing

books

Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. 2019. McClelland & stewart / penguin random house canada

“A beautiful and haunting memoir of kinship and culture rediscovered.”

Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well as her Korean mother, father, siblings, and extended family. At the guesthouse for transnational adoptees where she lived, alliances were troubled by violence and fraught with the trauma of separation and of cultural illiteracy. Unsurprisingly, heartbreakingly, Wills found that her nascent relationships with her family were similarly fraught.

Winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction (2019)

Jury Citation: “Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.: A Memoir is a poignant story of the untidy family life that unfolds when Jenny Heijun Wills travels from Montreal to Seoul to find the biological parents who gave her up for adoption in her infancy. Braving heartbreak and the risk of forever losing her way, Wills journeys through the emotional terrain of home, bonding, and belonging with exceptional poise. Finely observed, meticulous, and candid, this memoir offers its subjects no easy redemptions, only the chance to grow together towards greater understanding. Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. captures Canada at its richest, deeply rooted in home while also very much part of the world” (Ivan Coyote, Trevor Herriot, and Manjushree Thapa).

formats:

Hardcover * Ebook * Audiobook (Narrated by Diana Bang)

excerpt

Adoption and Multiculturalism: Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific. 2020. University of michigan press.

Edited by Jenny Heijun Wills, Tobias Hübinette & Indigo Willing

This co-edited volume features ten chapters by top scholars from around the world and from across disciplines and fields who come together in consideration of multiculturalism, globalization, and race as those concepts are related to transnational and transracial adoption. The goal of this collection is to diversify and de-homogenize what is known as the “Western Receiving Nation”—a monolithic, typically americentric symbol imagined by Critical Adoption Scholars—by outlining the very distinct national circumstances that go into these kinds of cross-border adoptive practices. Multiculturalism in these spaces, which include Canada (and Quebec), the United States, Spain, France, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Australia, is weighted by different modes of colonialism, ethnic “sanitation,” and nationalism. Histories of imperialism and colonialism, as well as sovereignty, impact multiculturalist approaches, which in turn impact how the kinning of foreign children is undertaken. Chapters are divided into three sections: a) Negotiating Everyday, Familial, and National Multiculturalisms; b) Interrupting Myths of Post-Raciality and Autochtony; and c) Exposing Discrepancies: Racial Purity and the Multicultural Adoptive Land.

formats:

Hardcover

Teaching Asian North American Texts

Edited by Jennifer Ho & Jenny Heijun Wills

This anthology consists of over twenty chapters by leading scholars in Asian North American studies. The collection focuses on pedagogical approaches to teaching Asian North American texts in institutes of higher learning that range from community colleges and liberal arts colleges to top tier research universities. Essays address both Canadian and American content. Unlike other books in this series, chapters in Teaching Asian North American are not centred on specific authors or texts; rather, each contributor draws on works throughout their essay, but chooses texts based on genre, medium, and/or theme. Structured this way, this collection can guide instructors as they formulate diverse Asian NA survey courses, but it also appeals to professors who wish to include more Asian North American perspectives in their specific genre/theme-based offerings. Chapters are divided in two sections: a) Forms and Genres (which include: experimental poetry, plays, detective fiction, photography, historical novel, graphic narratives, etc.); and b) Themes (which include: trauma, food and consumption, transnational adoption, diaspora, etc.).

Forthcoming.

radical kinships: an anthology of autocritical writing

Edited by Jenny Heijun Wills, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Lisa Moore & Joshua Whitehead

In the autocritical, like metanarrative, the text draws attention to its status as text, but here the author too draws attention to their role as narrator, to the act of writing. The autocritical, then, acts as a bridge between the creative and the critical, the affective and the theoretical. The essays and contributions featured in this volume highlight some of the opportunities afforded by autocritical approaches to knowledge creation; they also gesture to some of the shortcomings. We contend that the autocritical, what Indigenous author and critic Gerald Vizenor considers an act of “survivance,” is a meaningful tool for critics and writers working through issues related to non-conventional, radical kinship (including adoption, fostering, surrogacy, and donorship). Made up of both critical essays and creative interventions, this collection explores autocritical writing and analyzes the (sometimes problematic) relationships it creates between writers and readers.

forthcoming. demeter press.

Other Writing

“An Epilogue on BIPoC Love.” Room. vol. 43, no. 4, 2019.
“A Certain Swanness: On Korean Adoption and Beauty.” This Magazine. Sept. 2019.

As a scholar of English literary studies and Critical Race Studies, many of my essays are academic in tone. While some of these essays are on the subject of transnational and transracial adoption, I also write about Asian North American literature(s) more broadly. I’m particularly excited about research I’ve been conducting on the subject of Francophone Asian Canadian writing within and beyond Quebec. I am also writing about Asian American popular culture.

Some essays available via academia.edu

Learn more