Upper School gathered in the theater to hear renowned author Paul Yoon speak as part of the 2024 Courtney Steel ’87 Visiting Author Program. Jules B ’25 gave a warm introduction for Yoon, highlighting his prolific writing career and his current teaching appointment at Harvard University.

Yoon opened his lecture by speaking about his own childhood in upstate New York. He shared, “Growing up, I’d always ask about my relatives.” He painted a picture of a childhood absent of visits to extended family as most of his relatives were in Korea, both North and South, or had emigrated to other distant locations. Through the brief descriptions of relatives that his father would share, Yoon crafted an “imagined memory of family.”

Yoon then began to weave this rumination on his childhood into the context of his most recent book, The Hive and the Honey. He told the students, “I always knew I wanted to tackle a book that was like a family tree.” The Hive and the Honey is a short story collection that spans different time frames and international locations to tell the complex story of diasporic communities. Yoon explained how the book was born out of a pandemic thought exercise where he would imagine a map of all of his friends. He drew comfort from the map. He pursued a desire to create that same sort of map for his imagined relatives and family, scattered across the globe.

Yoon read an excerpt from one of the collection’s stories titled, “Komarov,” which he described as his attempt at espionage fiction. The story followed a North Korean woman who worked in Barcelona, Spain, in the 1980s. Yoon’s reading navigated her complicated desire to be reunited with her son, a professional fighter who had been raised in the Soviet Union.

Following his reading, students asked about Yoon’s stylistic influences. Yoon explained that his first love was visual arts. He shared that he approached writing as a painter; he attempted to do the biggest, most vast epic in the smallest way possible. His reading, with its quiet rhythms and spare prose, washed over the students while the simmering tensions of separated families and geopolitical circumstance bubbled beneath the words’ surface. His reading illustrated his painterly approach. Students asked about his other influences, about the styles he tended toward. One of the final questions was about  the books he recommends, and he generously made his  suggestions: Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These.

This lecture was established to honor and remember Courtney Steel ’87 by her parents, family, and friends. This annual lecture brings a writer of national stature to the School, in recognition of Courtney’s passion for literature, gift for writing, and respect for the nuances of language. Past authors have included Jacqueline Woodson, James McBride, Barbara Krauthamer, Naima Coster ’04, and Poet and Multidisciplinary Artist J. Mae Barizo.