Reading by Gish Jen and Garrett Hongo

Photo by Basso Cannarsa

Gish Jen has published short work in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and dozens of other periodicals, anthologies and textbooks. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories four times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, her work was featured in a PBS American Masters’ special on the American novel and is widely taught. Jen is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living; she has also delivered the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. Her ninth book, Thank You, Mr. Nixon, is available in February 2022.

Photo by Franco-Salmoiraghi

Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawaiʻi, and grew up on the North Shore of Oʻahu and in Los Angeles. His most recent book is The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo (Pantheon, 2022). Others are The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays (University of Michigan Press, 2017) and Coral Road: Poems (Knopf, 2013). Currently, Hongo is at work on The Ocean of Clouds (poems). He teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences.