Stanford News / December 26, 2018

From a collection of personal essays and poetry to extraordinary stories of characters overcoming trying circumstances, three Stanford English professors and three current Wallace Stegner Fellows offer a diverse range of books to pick up over the winter holidays:

Publish Weekly / June 01, 2018

In Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me (Morrow, July), a young woman’s choice between lovers changes the lives of those around her during the Korean War.

Bustle / August 07, 2019

This week brings with it a variety of books that will transport you away from your current circumstances to places like Copenhagen, Cuba, and the fictional Gotham City. Many of these books feature women — fictional and real — who push boundaries and resist the rules to create a world that gives them the things they want and need.

Elle / August 08, 2018

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is as beautifully layered as it is devastating; in it, we encounter the resilient Haemi, who is thrust into marriage at sixteen, and charged with the care of her ailing younger brother, Hyunki.

The Cavalier Daily / September 19, 2018

To call any work of literature “epic” is to invoke a highly-loaded category — it’s a description that seems largely reserved for discussing the great deeds and anguish of exalted men. Yet it’d be difficult to describe Crystal Hana Kim’s sweeping, multigenerational debut “If You Leave Me” as anything but. The story opens on Haemi Lee, a 16-year-old girl coming of age in a refugee camp during the Korean War, and ultimately follows her life as she becomes caught between her childhood friend Kyunghwan and the overtures of his older, richer cousin Jisoo.   

lareviewofbooks / January 25, 2021

I’M IN A creative writing PhD program. I’m a fiction editor at a literary journal for people of color. I’ve planned POC-centered events and consulted with a POC press. I have attended the right conferences, where I met the right people and organized for racial justice.

The Michigan Daily / August 10, 2021

A³ (Asian American Authors) Spotlight is a writer interview series created by TMD’s Michigan in Color and Arts to spotlight and celebrate Asian American authors. The goal of this series is to feature artists whose content diversifies the landscape of Asian diasporic literature. For Crystal Hana Kim, writing her debut novel “If You Leave Me” was more than just an incumbent milestone. What started as drafts about these Korean women in Kim’s undergrad writing workshops was the inception to explore the unspoken, less “sensational” aspects of the Korean War. She’d teach afterward, getting involved in nonprofits like Teach For America, but once in graduate school, Kim revisited the characters for her most demanding project yet: a polyphonic historical fiction novel set to probe the rippling effects of the Korean War.