The evening will feature a conversation with Celeste Ng, the bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, and Ju Yon Kim, the Patsy Takemoto Mink Professor of English at Harvard University, reflecting on the ways their Asian heritage and their life experiences have informed and shaped their successful academic and writing careers. They will compare and contrast how Asian Americans are portrayed in film, literature, and American media and how their work has influenced and impacted the narrative about representation in culture.

The Wah Lum Kung Fu & Tai Chi Academy Dance troupe will also perform and GBH WORLD will preview upcoming program highlights from the May schedule celebrating AANHPI Heritage Month.

Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng is the bestselling author of three novels, Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She graduated from Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan). Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications. She is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.

Ju Yon Kim

Ju Yon Kim is the Patsy Takemoto Mink Professor of English at Harvard. Her research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary American literature and theater, with a particular focus on Asian American culture. Her first book, The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday, received the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association. She is currently working on a project titled Paper Performance: Suspicion and the Spaces of Asian American Theater.

This event is free and open to the public but registration is required.