Jennifer Hope Choi is the recipient of the 2020-2022 Tulsa Artist Fellowship, the Carson McCullers Center’s Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship, the BuzzFeed Emerging Writer Fellowship, and the AHL Foundation’s inaugural Wolhee Choe Art Writers Grant. She is also a Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholar and an Aspen Words fellow. She has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing and A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South. Her writing has appeared in many places, including The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, Lucky Peach, BuzzFeed News, Bon Appétit, and Afar, where she is a senior editor for the print magazine.

Her debut memoir, The Wanderer’s Curse (W. W. Norton, 2025), was named one of the most anticipated books of the year by Condé Nast Traveler. Garden & Gun, and featured in The New Yorker. In 2026, The Wanderer’s Curse received the Asian Pacific American Libraries Association Honor Award Winner in Nonfiction.

A frequent guest lecturer, she has spoken at and taught for academic institutions such as the University of Oklahoma, Columbia University, Columbus State University, the University of Minnesota, and Hub City about artmaking, nonfiction storytelling, and the craft of writing.

Photo by Lizzy Rollins