Patti Kim was born in Pusan, Korea, in 1970 and immigrated to the United States in 1974. She was the Diane Cleaver Fellow at Ledwig House, the New York writers' colony. A Cab Called Reliable is her first novel. It won the 1997 Towson University Prize for Literature and was a nominee for the Book-of-the-Month Club's Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction. She lives in Potomac, Maryland.