Writers Block is our new bi-monthly free virtual community event where you can personally engage with Korean American authors live!
About this Event
Join us for our fourth edition of Writers Block with author Alexander Chee! You will be able to listen to Alexander speak more about his book and his personal story. Also get a chance to ask him your questions first-hand and get to know him in an exclusive Zoom room. Limited spots available.
This program is made possible by our monthly Storytellers Circle donors. Consider joining in order to keep events like this free!
Register HERE
This event will be recorded and published afterward. If you would like to opt-out, you may disable your camera during the event.
About Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. A contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewaneee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays.
He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak.
He teaches as an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
About the book All You Can Ever Know:
Named a Best Book of 2018 by New York Magazine, The Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, NPR, and Time Magazine, among others, this essay collection from the author of The Queen of the Night explores how we form our identities in life and in art. As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as “masterful” by Roxane Gay, and “incendiary” by The New York Times. With How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, his first collection of nonfiction, he’s sure to secure his place as one of the finest essayists of his generation as well.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, his adult reckoning with childhood sexual trauma, the jobs that supported him as he wrote his debut, Edinburgh (from Tarot-reading to bookselling to cater-waiting for William F. Buckley), and the election of Donald Trump.
By turns commanding, heartbreaking, and wry, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel asks questions about how we create ourselves in life and in art, and how to fight when our dearest truths are under attack.
About the Host, Jay Oh
Jay is a board member of KoreanAmericanStory.org, as well as the Senior Director of Arts and Culture at the Korea Society. She has worked in publishing and non-profit art organizations in Greensboro, N.C., Minneapolis, and New York.
