Isabel J. Kim was born in Morristown, NJ. She moved shortly after to Korea, and then immediately after that to California. She continued to spend time between Santa Barbara and Daejeon, South Korea. Kim attended an international school in Korea before returning to New Jersey at age eleven. As a kid, Kim grew up surrounded by her parents’ prodigious collection of books. She also found books at the school library, at events like Scholastic’s book fairs, and whenever she was in the States on vacation.

Kim went to the University of Pennsylvania, earning a BA with a double major in creative writing and fine arts. She then earned a law degree at the same university, and her journey included a variety of internships: “Nickelodeon’s content and programming department, a biotech startup in Korea, and two different art galleries. I had a pretty eclectic resume when I was applying for jobs out of law school.”

Isable J. Kim’s fiction publication history started with “Kingmaker,” an interactive piece published by Sub-Q Magazine (March 31, 2020). “Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self” came out a year later in the March 2021 Clarkesworld, a story that tied for third place in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll and landed on the annual Locus Recommended Reading List. This was followed by “You’ll Understand When You’re a Mom Someday” (khōréō, August 2021) and “AP Practical Literary Theory Suggests This is a Quest (Or: What Danny Did Over Spring Break)” (Cast of Wonders, November 16, 2021), which was the beginning of a steady career in short fiction. Along the way, she received a number of glowing reviews, as well as winning a Shirley Jackson Award, a Locus Award, a BSFA Award, and two Nebula awards, plus a number of other award nods, including being a Sturgeon finalist, a Hugo finalist, and an Astounding Award finalist.

Kim moved back to New Jersey after college for work and ended up staying for family and friends. “A lot of people I know from high school ended up in a similar trajectory where they left for college and ended up in the vague NYC/NJ extended sprawl for work purposes. I love living in the New York metropolitan area because the sheer density of interesting things in New York is completely unmatched.” She became a full-time writer as of late 2025.

“I just got married in March, and I just turned thirty in February! 2026 is a meaningful experience speedrun for me.” Those experiences include the release of her debut novel, Sublimation, due this month from Tor.

Who are the authors or what are the books that you see as important to you, and why?

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Peter Watts’ Blindsight. Pretty much anything that Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Kelly Link, or Ted Chiang wrote. And specifically, Kij Johnson’s story “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss.”These are all works I encountered when I was a teenager or in my early twenties, which made me think differently about the craft of writing and, for the speculative works, made me think about the possibilities specifically specfic held. I read more extensively than this (I have a real soft spot for epic fantasy that isn’t really obvious from my work), but because of these works, my writing “voice” leans toward vaguely literary, very voicey, occasionally sarcastic fiction with a speculative core.

Your novel, Sublimation, has gotten a lot of buzz, but your first short story came out relatively recently (“Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self,” Clarkesworld, March 2021). Are there important steps you took to make everything happen; were there years of submissions behind the scenes?

It’s crazy that 2021 is “relatively recent” in publishing terms when to me, 2021 feels an entire lifetime away. In 2021, I was graduating law school, and I had spent a couple of years tepidly trying to get my short fiction published, and I was pretty sure writing would be a hobby, not a job. Between 2018 and 2020, I wrote maybe one or two stories a year and received zero acceptances until “Homecoming”(although, if we’re being technical, “Clay”received a revise and resubmit from Beneath Ceaseless Skies before “Homecoming”).

After that, everything kind of exploded for me, and the big difference was that I started writing and submitting aggressively, without being too precious about my submissions. Having one acceptance gave me the push to start finishing my work because now that I had been published once, I felt that it was possible to be published again. And to some extent, this experience taught me that short fiction is a numbers game. The more you submit, the more likely it is that an editor will like your work, the more chances it goes viral on the Internet . . . et cetera.

The same thing was true about the novel: having a novel available to show editors when “Why Don’t We Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole”blew up online was invaluable in getting the book deal for Sublimation.

To a large extent, “Writer success” is a nebulous concept, and it feels like there’s always another step on the ladder that I should be aspiring toward. Like, “I need an agent, I need a book deal, I need good sales . . . et cetera.” It’s sort of funny, I have a lot of outward trappings of success, but I still sort of feel like I’m on a hamster wheel trying to make the writer thing work.

I used to wish there was a formula for success, and the only thing I’ve learned is there is no formula. You just have to keep writing because if you don’t write, you have nothing to show people. Write what you like, be nice to people, find the readers and friends who get what you’re trying to do. When you’re working on something, it feels very lonely. But you have to have work to show people when they finally ask you what you’re working on. Every story you write is like buying a lottery ticket. You can’t win if you don’t play.

What is the feeling behind the rapid success—the deals, the awards, and even the buzz? Is it gratifying, is it nerve-wracking, are there other emotions and consequences?

It’s cool! It’s weird! It’s unsettling! For a while, it felt like there was a big camera lens pointed at me, and also like everyone was doing discourse about “Why Don’t We Just . . . ”while I was trapped behind a plexiglass wall. That experience caused me to gain some very firm beliefs about the death of the author in the interpretation of texts, and also how authors shouldn’t be online. Please pay no attention to the number of Bluesky posts I make daily. The awards are a little overwhelming, and I try not to think about them, or else my ego will explode.

With the book deals, I feel like I’ve been handed an opportunity that I would have killed for a few years ago, and that I have a responsibility to my past self to make the most of it. I’m a normal amount of anxious about trying to live up to the hype, and I mostly want to create work that I can look back on and say that I’ve used my time and opportunities well to create. At the end of the day, I try to keep the guiding principles of “I am making work I want to read” and “I am making work that makes people make a weird face at me when I explain it sometimes.”

That being said, I’m having fun. I love meeting readers (shout out to my fan club, who handed me an incredible badge at Worldcon), and I am occasionally stunned by the fact that people think that I have interesting things to say, and that people who inspired my own writing have read my work. That’s all incredibly cool.

And at the end of the day, the nice thing about writer success or writer notoriety is that it’s pretty limited. Everyone in my life just treats me like they’ve always treated me.

Thinking on your short fiction to date, which are the stories that feel more personal for you, and why?

“Day Ten Thousand” is my most personal story by leaps and bounds. It’s very obliquely about two very strange, sad deaths that happened while I was in college, one of which I ended up having to write about for the school newspaper. I don’t want to go into detail about the circumstances (it feels a bit rude to the individuals involved), but “Day Ten Thousand” was about my experience having to write about suicide bubbles and mental health when I was twenty-one and not adequately trained to write about either topic.

“Homecoming” is probably the one people assume is very personal, but it’s not actually as autobiographical as people think. I did lift a couple of my childhood memories and locations, and in retrospect, I sort of regret that. I felt more okay writing more personal things when fewer people were reading them, and I think people read more into this story than is there.

Are there one or two short stories that were harder to write, and how so?

Not to harp on “Day Ten Thousand,” but that story contains three interlocking narratives that are set at very different time periods that all have to emotionally braid together, and I needed to have three different word processor windows simultaneously open to write it. That one is my magnum opus of technical difficulty.

The Perpetual Post was also weirdly difficult to write—a fun fact about my writing is that a lot of the time, I will get to the two-thirds mark of a story and then put it down for a few months. I put The Perpetual Post down for four years. Don’t ask me why. I only finished it last winter, and I can’t explain why I was able to finish it now, rather than earlier. The ending wasn’t even complicated. Who can explain the inner machinations of the human mind?

Do you have a short story that you really loved, that you thought would gain more notice, but that, for whatever reasons, didn’t really seem to get noticed?

I really love “Human Voices” and “Christopher Mills, Return to Sender,” personally. When I write a story, I usually make a conscious decision about how self-indulgent I’m going to be while writing. “Human Voices” and “Christopher Mills” are both very classically self-indulgent IJK stories—voicey, a little funny, a mundane-magic blend, weird family situations, and some mythology. So I like them. I think they’re slept on! They’re fun! Read them!

In general, I’ve noticed that my short science fiction tends to get more traction than my short fantasy (“You’ll Understand When You’re a Mom Someday” is the exception). I choose to learn nothing from this and will not be changing any of my writing habits.

Has writing novels always been the goal? Do you see yourself as transitioning away from short fiction, or is short fiction something you will continue to explore?

Like many other authors, I too have aspired to write a novel since I was a baby middle schooler armed with Microsoft Word, the family computer, and a dream. I tend to write short fiction when I have a really specific, crystallized idea, or something I want to explore quickly, and the novels are more like having an ongoing project that I hammer at every day. Sprints versus marathons. They’re satisfying in different ways, and I like using the shorts as a platform to play with ideas that later end up in long-form.

What is novel Sublimation about, and what are the most important differences between the novel and the short story that started it all?

On the plot level, Sublimation is about a young woman going back to Korea for her grandfather’s funeral in a universe where crossing borders splits people in two. Her other self is waiting for her in Korea and has plans that she hasn’t accounted for. The rest of the novel is about dealing with the consequences of their meeting. On the thematic level, Sublimation is about confronting and reconciling with the decisions that led to your current self, and it is also about questioning the extent to which governments or private entities should have power over the ability of individuals to define their national identities.

The big difference between the short story and the novel is that the short story ends at about the one-quarter mark of the novel, and the novel massively expands the universe from there. The short story is more of a tour into a specific situation and emotion, while the novel is an exploration of “given these natural phenomena as they exist, how would human beings attempt to change the status quo?”

The other big difference is that the novel has a new point of view character, which a lot of people have told me is their favorite.

Sublimation features six points of view. How did you manage writing them and developing them as distinctive individuals?

Six points of view that are all derivations of two different people, even!

I developed each character’s voice by thinking about the intrinsic characteristics of the two people who split into the six POVs, and how these characteristics would express themselves in different circumstances. For instance, Soyoung and Rose started out determined, a little selfish, not very introspective, and scared of emotional conflict. These character traits are then milled by ten years of change into Soyoung, who is more determined and avoidant, and Rose, who is less determined but more willing to ask hard questions. Then, finally, I ask myself how these character traits would express themselves in narration and dialogue, after which I start putting everyone down on the page.

Sublimation is described as “thrilling and provocative.” When you first thought of expanding the short story, did this feel like the most natural direction, or were there other types of narratives you had considered as well?

In every version I considered, it was obvious that (spoilers ahead!) the next step Soyoung-Rose would take would be to try and reverse her reintegration, and there would be a major corporate thriller-y element because I wanted to talk about technology in relation to natural phenomena.

I had briefly considered an alternate, quieter version of this novel that was less specifically about Soyoung-Rose’s story and more about global diaspora narratives, and then I realized I didn’t have the life experience to write that one with the degree of authenticity that I’d have wanted to bring.

What, for you, is at the heart of this book; what is important to you about this story?

I probably beat people over the head with this in the novel, but the main messages are that it is better to know than not to know, and that it is better to have a choice than not to have a choice, no matter how complicated knowing and choices make life. I hope that people come away from this story with more understanding of how it feels to be alienated or a foreigner, and more empathy for those in difficult situations.

What are the things you learned from writing Sublimation that you will apply to writing future books?

Working on Sublimation gave me a lot of practice in expanding a short story into longer fiction—it gave me a lot of practice in fine-tuning how the narrative has to be structured and modulating the information density across the text. It does make me want to expand some of my other short stories into longer works . . . no promises, though.

It also taught me that apparently, people will let me write novels that are 80 percent in the second person. So, that was a dangerous thing for me, noted second person enjoyer, to learn.

Are there genres or styles that you are eager to explore at novel-length?

All of them! I want to write everything. I want to write a far-future spaceship-y science fiction novel. I want to write a romantasy. I want to write an epic fantasy trilogy. I want to write another of those almost-literary books where there is only the slightest hint of a speculative element. I want to write an isekai. I want to write about how messed up the laws around reproductive rights are. I want to write a book where the main character is an attorney and the world is ending, and it’s really about the way that people my age feel like they are inheriting a dying future—haha, what? Anyway. Yeah. I have a lot of things I hope to write. A lot of them I probably won’t. Some of them, I will.

The next book I have coming out is a YA novel about learning magic, stealing from your mentor, and playing five million games of go fish with Death. It is a very different novel from Sublimation, and I’m excited for people to read that as well.

Do you feel that genre fiction, stories that engage with the speculative and fantastic, do something different from nonspeculative works?

At the end of the day, everyone writing speculative fiction isn’t really writing about the future or fantasy or alien universes. We’re writing about the present, and what we fear will come of it. And the beautiful thing about speculative fiction is that by couching your fiction in a different world, you can talk about current issues in a way that feels much less ham-handed than if you were just writing about them directly. I find that this can be very effective in getting around people’s mental biases, and while not everything is social commentary, to quote a meme, we live in a society.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about Sublimation, you, or your other work?

By buying a copy of Sublimation, you are actively supporting the “Isabel Doesn’t Have to Go Be a Lawyer Again” fund. We hope you support our noble cause.