Michelle Zauner

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© Barbora Mrazkova

A close-up of Michelle Zauner.

Michelle Zauner

With the band Japanese Breakfast, Michelle Zauner forged an acclaimed career in music; the band's most recent album, Jubliee, scored a couple nominations at the 2022 Grammys. Zauner is also a celebrated author, with her 2021 memoir spending more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Crying in H Mart tells Zauner's story of growing up as one of the few Korean American students in Eugene, Oregon, moving on from the struggles of adolescence into adulthood and finding a creative home, and a family tragedy that sparked a personal reckoning. Zauner will talk about the book at this Wisconsin Book Festival event.

media release: In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band -- and meeting the man who would become her husband—her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.



Michelle Zauner is best known as a singer and guitarist who creates dreamy, shoegaze – inspired indie pop under the name Japanese Breakfast. She has won acclaim from major music outlets around the world for releases like Psychopomp and Soft Sounds from Another Planet. Her most recent album, Jubilee, earned two GRAMMY nominations for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album. Her first book, Crying in H Mart, is a New York Times Best Seller. She’s currently adapting the memoir for the screen for MGM’s Orion Pictures.