Carolyn Chun

Carolyn Chun is an experimental novelist and research mathematician with an unusually braided career: she completed a Ph.D. in mathematics and an M.F.A. in creative writing in the same month at Louisiana State University, in August 2009, and has continued to publish in both fields since. Born in Pennsylvania in 1980, she studied mathematics and physics at Rutgers University before moving to Baton Rouge for graduate school. Her Ph.D. advisor was the matroid theorist James G. Oxley; her M.F.A. thesis advisor was the experimental poet and novelist Laura Mullen.

That M.F.A. thesis became How to Break Article Noun (JEF Books, 2012), which won the 2012 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, the first novel published under JEF's revived prize. The judge that year, Yuriy Tarnawsky, wrote that the book was "really about breaking a person's heart and the traditional form of the novel." It is structured as seven sections of seven chapters each and braids fiction with physics formulas, botanical Latin, poetry, and embedded essay. Her second novel, Nobody Will Bury Us If We Die Here (eLectio Publishing, 2013), retells the Garden of Eden as a story of language and exile. She also contributed to JEF's 2017 anthology Offbeat/Quirky.

Her mathematical career has run alongside the fiction. After postdoctoral fellowships at Victoria University of Wellington (on an NSF International Research Fellowship) and Brunel University London, she taught mathematics at the United States Naval Academy, and is now Associate Research Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Maryland, where she heads modeling and simulations for the Koeth Research Group. She continues to publish in matroid theory, with collaborators including James G. Oxley, Geoff Whittle, Dillon Mayhew, Joseph E. Bonin, and her sister, the mathematician Deborah Chun.

Start with How to Break Article Noun, the inaugural revived-Patchen winner and her one book on the JEF list.