Katherine Min Literary Collection – M2020.04

Table of Contents


Summary Information

Repository
UNC Asheville Special Collections and University Archives
Title
Katherine Min Literary Collection
ID
M2020.04
Date [inclusive]
1989-2019
Extent
2.5 Linear feet
Physical Description
Includes journal articles, journals, books, and documents.
Location
Located in Special Collections, Row 4, Section 5.
Language
English

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], Katherine Min Literary Collection, D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina Asheville

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Biographical Note

Katherine Min was born in Champaign, IL to Kongki and Yungwha Min and grew up with her brother Kollin in upstate New York. Katherine knew from a young age that she wanted to be a fiction writer. She began by telling colorful lies on the playground in elementary school and writing an illustrated picaresque novel at age twelve. After majoring in English at Amherst College and marrying her classmate Roy Andrews, she attended Columbia Journalism School and worked as a journalist in Boston and Seoul, Korea. She never stopped writing fiction, even as she moved to New Hampshire, worked at the alumni magazine and as an adjunct professor at Plymouth State University, and raised two kids, Kayla and Clay Min Andrews. She began publishing in literary journals such as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Glimmer Train, TriQuarterly, The Threepenny Review, and many others. She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1992, a Pushcart Prize for her story “Courting a Monk” in 1998, and a New Hampshire State Council for the Arts Fellowship in 1998 and 2004. In 1999, her short story “The Brick” was read on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts program.

Katherine’s novel Secondhand World was published by Knopf in 2006. (It was translated and published in Italian in 2011). Secondhand World was one of two finalists for the PEN/Bingham Prize, given to “exceptionally talented fiction writers” whose debut novels or short story collections “represent distinguished literary achievement and suggest great promise.” Katherine got a lot of writing done during artist residencies at Yaddo, Hambidge, the Millay Colony, Ledig House, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Jentel, Ucross, and especially the MacDowell Colony. She received a North Carolina State Arts Council Fellowship in 2009 and won the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award in 2012. She was working on her second novel, The Fetishist, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014. Surprising everyone including herself, Katherine’s diagnosis caused her to lose interest in writing fiction and instead to begin writing personal essays exploring her experiences with cancer and dying. In 2017, the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University presented a special evening of classical music to accompany a live reading by Katherine. The concert included an original composition commissioned especially for the occasion; entitled Falling Still, it was inspired by her essay “On Being Humpty Dumpty”. Selected essays have been published in The Rumpus, Hyphen, and Arkansas International, and all are available at katherinekmin.com.

Katherine taught literature and creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Asheville from 2007 to 2018, and at the Queens University of Charlotte low-residency MFA program and the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Katherine Min died in hospice on Sunday, March 17, 2019 — the day after her 60th birthday — in Asheville, NC.

Biography of Katherine Min from her website and is used courtesy of her family: Greg Hershey, Kayla Min Andrews, and Clay Min Andrews.

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Administrative Information

Publication Information

UNC Asheville Special Collections and University Archives

Ramsey Library, CPO # 1500
One University Heights
Asheville, North Carolina, 28804-8504
828.251.6645
speccoll@unca.edu

Rights

The material is available for reading and research in Special Collections at UNC Asheville. Any display, publication, or public use must credit Special Collections, D.H. Ramsey Library, University of North Carolina Asheville. Copyright for all materials is retained by the family of Katherine Min.

Custodial History

Donated by Katherine Min’s family: Greg Hershey, Kayla Min Andrews, and Clay Min Andrews.

Accruals

Additional accruals are expected.

Processing Information

Processed by UNC Asheville English intern Tamera Bodrick, Spring 2020. Additional finding aid information by Gene Hyde.

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Collection Inventory

Box 1
Folder 1: “The Brick.” River Styx, vol. 31, 1989, pp. 65-70.
Folder 2: “Trick.” Dominion Review, vol. 8, 1990, pp. 36-42.
Folder 3: “Eulogy.” The Bridge, vol. 1, no. 1, 1990, pp. 67-71.
Folder 4: “The One Who Goes Farthest Away.” Special Report, 1990, pp. 7-12.
Folder 5: “Danny.” Ploughshares: special issue Confronting Racial Difference, vol. 16, no. 2-3, 1990, pp. 180-188.
Folder 6: “Spinning.” The Chattahoochee Review, vol. 11, no. 1, 1990, pp. 24-31.
Folder 7: “Blonde.” Beloit Fiction Journal, vol. 7, no. 1-2, 1992, pp. 108-110.
Folder 8: “Expatriate.” Salmon Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, 1992, pp. 157-171.
Folder 9: “Greengrocer.” Descant: The Texas Christian University Literary Journal, vol. 32, no. 2, 1992, pp. 82-86.
Folder 10: “Brother.” Housewife-Writer’s Forum, vol. 7, no. 3, 1993, pp. 27-29, 36.
Folder 11: “Objects.” Glimmer Train, no. 7, 1993, pp. 125-133.
Box 2
Folder 1: “The One Who Goes Farthest Away.” Worlds of Fiction, 1993, pp. 839-846.
Folder 2: “In a Foreign Country.” Confrontation, 1994, pp. 202-207.
Folder 3: “The One Who Goes Farthest Away.” The Asian Pacific American Journal: special issue Heroes and Superheroes, vol. 3, no. 2, 1994, pp. 95-106.
Folder 4: “K-Boy and 2 Bad.” TriQuarterly, vol. 89, 1994, pp. 38-51.
Folder 5: “My Lover’s Wife.” Prairie Schooner, vol. 69, 1995, pp. 83-91.
Box 3
Folder 1: “Courting a Monk.” TriQuarterly, vol. 95, 1995, pp. 101-113.
Folder 2: K-Boy and 2 Bad.” Sheaf: special issue Youth Culture, 1995, pp. 91-108.
Folder 3: “Salt Lake.” Another Chicago Magazine, no. 30, 1995, pp. 103-114.
Folder 4: “Oriental Sex Kittens for a Nuclear Free Zone.” Moonrabbit Review: Asian Pacific American Voices, vol. 1, no. 2, 1996, pp. 1-7.
Folder 5: “Eyelids.” The Threepenny Review, no. 66, 1996, pp. 27-29.
Folder 6: “On Anger and Ambivalence.” Yellow Light: The Flowering of Asian American Arts, 1999, pp. 157-159., “The Brick.” Yellow Light: The Flowering of Asian American Arts, 1999, pp. 159-164.
Folder 7: “Scruteless.” River Styx, vol. 58-59, 2000, pp. 93-106.
Folder 8: “The Liberation of a Face.” Triquarterly, vol. 110-111, 2001, pp. 102-106.
Box 4
Folder 1: Secondhand World Master Proof, Alfred Knopf, 2206
Secondhand World – 3 editions 1) hardback 1st edition, Knopf, 2006; 2) trade paperback, Anchor Books, 2006; and 3) Mondo di sconda mano, Italian trade paperback
Box 5
Folder 1: “The Music Lover.” Long Story Short, 2009, 120-122.
Folder 2: “After the Falls.” Topograph: New Writing from the Carolinas and the Landscape Beyond, 2010, pp. 65-72.
Folder 3: “Miscegenation.” River Styx, vol. 81-82, 2010, pp. 67-80.
Folder 4: “Music Lover.” Boomtown: Explosive Writing from Ten Years of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA Program, 2011, pp. 271-273.
Folder 5: “The Fetishist.” Black Clock, no. 14, 2011, pp. 12-17.
Folder 6: “On Wigs.” Punctuate: a Nonfiction Magazine, no. 1, 2012, pp. 11-14.
Folder 7: “On Form.” The Arkansas International, no. 6, 2019, pp. 129-132., “On Things.” The Arkansas International, no. 6, 2019, pp. 133-152.
Folder 8: Publisher correspondence and publication documentation for Secondhand World
Folder 9: Interview with Katherine Min (from Glimmer Train, Isssue 82, Spring 2012)