BIO

Julie Kim writes about motherhood, inclusion, and her experiences raising a disabled child in an ableist world. She is a 2024 recipient of the DeGroot Foundation's Courage to Write grant.

Julie's essays and reporting have been featured in The Atlantic, Cup of Jo, The Cut, New York Magazine, and Wirecutter, the product review site for The New York Times, where she has offered product recommendations for caretakers of disabled and medically-complex children. Julie earned a B.A. from Brown and a Master's Degree from UC Berkeley. She has worked in editorial roles at nonprofits and tech companies and currently serves on the board of City Arts & Lectures. Julie lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, kids, and a clingy pandemic puppy named Potion.

Julie is represented by Kate Garrick at Salky Literary Management. She is in her second year as a Lighthouse Book Project mentee working under Vauhini Vara.

Artist Statement

My writing aims to interrogate tired narratives about ability and disability as an acceptable basis for deciding whose lives are valuable, and whose lives are not.

I seek to expand the notion of who counts as a “contributing member of society” — to fill the room with proof that humans are more alike than different.

I am driven by an impulse to highlight quiet forms of societal exclusion that are often permitted in the name of individual betterment and striving.

I am the well-educated, highly successful, and first American-born daughter of South Korean immigrants, both survivors of war and poverty, two “self-made” physicians who framed my childhood with a familial and cultural duty to achieve at the highest levels.

I am also a mother — to my own daughter, born in 2017 with significant and lifelong disabilities. I cannot ignore the fact that to raise her the way I was raised would mean pushing her into the margins. Her full inclusion in society should be the rule, not the exception. Most anyone willing can see their own self in my daughter — easy proof that she is not as “special” or “unique” as others think.

I have dedicated myself to undoing and working out my own ableism on the page.

It is not lost on me that my daughter led me to write, a creative instinct I had as early as seven years old, but which I readily abandoned out of a need to conform. Now, in my late 40’s, I am more focused and fulfilled than during any of my earlier, more palatable pursuits.

In my next life, I will be a FBI agent or investigative reporter.