Asian American Studies Lecture Series: Yiyun Li and Jia Tolentino

Yiyun Li (Photo: Denise Applewhite)

Celebrating New Asian American Writing

Princeton University Professor of Creative Writing Yiyun Li’s debut short story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, The Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. Her novel The Vagrants won the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for International Dublin Literary Award. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, her second collection, was a finalist for the Story Prize and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Kinder Than Solitude, her latest novel, was published to critical acclaim. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her most recent book is a novel, Where Reasons End (Random House, 2019).

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror (Random House, 2019). Formerly, she was the deputy editor at Jezebel and a contributing editor at the Hairpin. She grew up in Texas, went to University of Virginia, and got her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Grantland, and Pitchfork, among other places. She lives in Brooklyn.

In 2019-20, in cooperation with the Program in Creative Writing, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the Department of English, the Asian American Studies Lecture Series is dedicated to contemporary Asian American letters, to showcase the recent explosion of Asian American creative writers and to highlight the expansive geopolitical diversity of what constitutes Asian American letters today.

A book signing and reception will follow in the Upper Hyphen.