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Join us for the launch of Everything and Nothing At All (Knopf Canada), by Jenny Heijun Wills! In conversation with David Chariandy.ABOUT THE BOOK: As a transnational and transracial adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the fraught spaces of ethnicity and belonging. As a pan-polyam individual, she lives between types of family—adopted, biological, chosen—and "community"; heternormativity and queerness; commitment and a constellation of love. And as a parent with a lifelong eating disorder, who self-harms to cope with mental illness, her love language is to feed, but daily she wishes her body would disappear. These facets of Wills' being have served as the anchors she once clung to and the harsh parameters of what others now imagine she can be. Everything and Nothing At All weaves together a lifetime of literary criticism, cultural study, and a personal history into a staggering tapestry of knowledge. And though the experiences of accumulating this knowledge have often been shot through with pain, Wills spins these threads into priceless gold—a radical, fearless vision of kinship and family. Devastating, illuminating, and beautifully crafted, these essays breathe life into the ambiguities and excesses of Wills' self, transforming them into something more—something that could be everything.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: JENNY HEIJUN WILLS was born in Seoul, South Korea and was adopted and raised in a white family in Southern Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related., which won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize in 2019 and the Manitoba Book Awards' Best First Book Prize in 2020. She is a Fulbright Alum (Harvard) and in 2015 was Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. She holds two BA-Hons (Journalism, English), an MA, and a PhD. She currently teaches at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba.
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315 Roncesvalles Avenue,Toronto,M6R 2M6,CA, Canada
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