Nik Nadeau 임창훈

@nikchanghoon.bsky.social

416 Followers 301 Following

Korean adoptee writer. '24 Annie Dillard Prize for CNF winner & Iowa Review Award finalist. '24-25 Bread Loaf, Tin House & Kenyon alum. CNF reader @ Hypertext Review. nikchanghoon.com

Screenshot of author bio: Nik Chang Hoon 임창훈 (he/him) is a Korean transracial adoptee, memoirist and poet based in Minneapolis. His creative nonfiction won the 2024 Annie Dillard Prize (Bellingham Review) and was named a finalist for The Iowa Review Award in nonfiction. His poetry has appeared in The Plentitudes (Winter 2025) and the Blue Earth Review (2024 Minnesota BIPOC Emerging Writer Award Runner-Up), and was named a 2024 MAYDAY Micro-chapbook Contest finalist. His most recent essays are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review and The Texas Review, respectively. Nik is a 2024-25 alum of the Bread Loaf, Kenyon Review and Tin House writers workshops, and will attend the 2025 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference as a staff scholar in poetry. Since 2023 he has trained under some of the United States' most acclaimed writers and poets, including Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Mitchell S. Jackson, Nicole Chung, Jami Nakamura Lin, Emilly Prado, Jenny Boully, Rajiv Mohabir, Sun Yung Shin, Q.M. Zhang, Shannon Gibney and Michael Kleber-Diggs. LEAVE ME, DON’T LEAVE ME, his memoir-in-progress, attempts to reconstruct his adoption origin story through personal narrative, epistles to first-family members, and speculative interstitials (e.g, to converse with his non-adopted self). As he unearths his own version of the truth, he finds acceptance of the self he has gained – even at the irreversible cost of the one he has lost. The memoir also critiques intercountry adoption as a capitalistic practice and argues for reparations to the 200,000-plus Koreans exported to Western countries since the Korean War. In past lives Nik has worked as a DEI practitioner, executive speechwriter, campaign communications director, writing center instructor and Korean high school English teacher through the Fulbright program. He enjoys taking walks with his wife and their very spoiled golden doodle, whose hobbies include barking at perfectly nice pedestrians and attempting to befriend the neighbor’s chickens.
Participants gather atop a green lawn to celebrate the Kenyon Review Residential Writers Workshop.