Nami Mun will visit Highline Big Picture High School on Jan. 6, courtesy of Seattle Arts & Lectures' Writers in the Schools (WITS) program.

Mun will be read from her new novel, Miles from Nowhere, and speak to Big Picture students at 2 p.m.

She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize as well as scholarships and residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony.

Her stories have been published in the 2007 Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Iowa Review, and Tin House, among others, and she currently teaches fiction writing at Columbia College Chicago.

Miles from Nowhere is the story of a young Korean-American girl who navigates homelessness, physical abuse and drug addiction during her years as a runaway in New York City.

Mun was a teenage runaway herself, and says of her book, "I needed to write. I needed to tell the story of a teenage runaway...I want [my readers] to understand that the homeless guy holding out his hand and the addict nodding off on the bus and the sex worker in the back seat of a car, and even the murderer locked up in prison were all children once."

Seattle Arts & Lectures' Writers in the Schools program places professional local writers in public elementary, middle, and high school classrooms to spark interest and develop skills in reading and writing.

Since its founding in 1994, the program has served 67,500 K-12 public school students and 1,200 teachers in the Puget Sound region.

In the 2007-08 school year, the program has established 25 writer residencies in Highline, Tukwila and Seattle.