Joe Milan Jr.

media release: A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome Joe Milan and Wendy Wimmer for a reading and conversation on Joe's new book The All Americans.

This is an in person event at A Room of One's Own.

About the book

The All-American is a deeply funny and poignant coming-of-age tale that turns the American immigrant narrative on its head. 

In the woods behind a trailer park in rural Washington, Bucky, a Korean-American high school senior, trains alone with a tire tied to his waist to pursue his singular goal: to play college football. But when the U.S. government deports him and the South Korean Army conscripts him, he finds himself alone in the country of his birth and caught in the underbelly of a forgotten yet bitter war. To make it out safely and earn his ticket home, Beyonghak must face tough but essential questions about his family legacy and personal identity, at last parsing the difference between the roles he is expected to play and the type of man he wants to become.

Joe Milan Jr. is a second-generation Korean American who taught in Korea for nine years. He’s the author of the novel The All-American (W.W. Norton, 2023) and was the 2019-20 David T.K. Wong Creative Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. In addition, he has been a Barrick Graduate Fellow and BMI Ph.D. Fellow at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in wonderful places like The Rumpus, Literary Hub, F(r)iction, The Kyoto Journal, and others. He is now an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Waldorf University in Forest City, Iowa. You can read more of his work at joemilanjr.com

Wendy Wimmer has spent many years in underpaid and overworked jobs while completing her degrees in English from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (BA - English), the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee (MA-English) and the University of Nevada - Las Vegas (PhD - English Literature with a Creative Dissertation). Her work has appeared in The Believer, Electric Literature, Blackbird, Barrelhouse, Per Contra, Jet Fuel Review, Waxwing and others. She received the 2021 Autumn House Fiction Prize, honors for adult fiction from the Society of Midland Authors and a Kirkus Review Top 100 Indie Books recognition for her debut collection, ENTRY LEVEL:STORIES. Wimmer lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where she is an editor for a large technology publication and also volunteers as the president of the board of a local community arts organization.