Joon Ae Haworth-Kaufka
Joon Ae: June (like the month) and “A” (like the letter)
Haworth-Kaufka: Hay-worth (like Rita Hayworth) and cough-ka (like Franz Kafka)
Joon Ae Haworth-Kaufka (she/they) is a Korean adoptee who was born in Seoul in 1976 and grew up outside of Detroit in a white, working-class Christian evangelical household. As an adoptee activist, Joon Ae’s goal is to help visibilize adoptee experiences and to educate folks on the troubling realities of the multi-billion dollar adoption industrial complex, especially as it relates to coercion of vulnerable birthing people and trafficking babies into wealthy white households from disenfranchised Black and brown families.
She holds an MFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University. She is the 2007 winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award, a 2x Tin House workshop participant, an Anaphora Arts alumna, and a 2024 Oregon Humanities storytelling fellow. Chapters of her novel-in-progress have been published in Hyphen Magazine, The Work & Response, The Plentitudes, Mochi Magazine, and the Bellevue Literary Review. Her other fiction has been in The Portland Review, Colorado Review, Kartika, WomenArts Quarterly Journal, Where Are You From: An Anthology of Asian American Literature, and more.
Previously, she spent 10+ years as writing faculty in higher education, focusing on institutionally disadvantaged students and specializing in transformative pedagogies and assessment, curriculum design, and program reform. Her research on diversity and student engagement has been published in various academic journals. Additionally, she spent some time doing human-centered design as a researcher and content strategist for a UX design firm.
As an intercountry, transracial adoptee who is estranged from her adoptive family and has no connection to her biological Korean family, community means everything to her. She spends much of her time on organizing and mutual aid efforts for various community projects. She co-organizes Constellation: A Reading Series at Tin House, VOICES, a BIPOC Adoptee Community, and Yeondae, a social justice collective of Asian adoptees. She also sits on the board of Income Movement, an economic justice organization. The small business she co-owns with her husband works exclusively with other small, local businesses and community-based organizations.
She loves dancing, eating, healing, tigers, dragons, reading, writing, young people, her ancestors, frank conversations, all the dogs in the world, muu-muus and sweatpants, mutual aid, teamwork, imagining new futures, comedy, good haircuts, learning about Korea, learning in general, her home, good design, labor unions, fancy vacuums, Korean shaman, and engaged Buddhism.
Joon Ae lives in Portland, OR with her partner, three kids, three spoiled dogs, and her snuggly chubby cat.