Young Chun was born in Champaign, Illinois, and raised in Chicago and Seattle. He traveled to Korea at the end of 2002 and was forcibly drafted into the Korean Army, starting his service in January 2004. He has a BA in Interdisciplinary Visual Art from the University of Washington and an MA in International Cooperation from Seoul National University. He currently resides in South Korea and teaches English at one of the nation’s largest public universities. The Accidental Citizen-Soldier, a memoir of his time in the Korean Army, is Young's first book, and he is currently working on his first novel.