CAROL ROH SPAULDING’S is the author of Waiting For Mr. Kim and Other Stories, a story collection that spans 4 generations of a Korean American family, centering on the life of a character named Gracie Song. A native Californian, Roh Spaulding drew inspiration from her mother’s life and her Korean American heritage in this collection, which she describes as a way writing herself into her own cultural self-understanding. 

Ironically, she didn’t begin that exploration as a child; it wasn’t until she went to Iowa for graduate school that she discovered an oral history done with her Korean grandmother and began to write the stories that became Waiting For Mr. Kim. 

This collection received the prestigious Flannery O’Conner award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press in 2022. Her other stories and essays have appeared in several nationally recognized publications and received several awards including a Pushcart Prize and the Glimmer Train Fiction Open. 

Roh Spaulding is a professor of English at Drake University and received her doctorate in American literature from the University of Iowa. In the 1980’s she lived for a couple of years in Paris at the famous address 27 rue de Fleurus — former residence of the American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein. Her forthcoming novel, Helen Button, which received the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts, is inspired by her time in France.

She lives with her husband in Granger, Iowa outside of Des Moines, where she pretends to homestead with a big garden, a fruit orchard, and 5 very spoiled hens.