How can writers reimagine global community along the lines of migration, translation, and literature? A panel with Jennifer Croft, Suketu Mehta, and Mee-ju Ro. Moderated by Rachel DeWoskin.
Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel Amadou (Bloomsbury, 2024), the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is also the author of Serpientes y escaleras and Notes on Postcards, as well as the translator of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula’s August, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (a finalist for the Kirkus Prize), Sylvia Molloy’s Dislocations, and Sebastián Martínez Daniell’s Two Sherpas. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from Northwestern University.
Suketu Mehta is Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. He is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004),which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian FirstBook Award; and This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Time Magazine and NPR. He has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction.
Mee-Ju Ro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. Her research focuses on Asian American women's writing and engages with the question of migration, forms of testimony, and the theory of translation.
Rachel DeWoskin is the award-winning author of five novels: Someday We Will Fly (Penguin Random House, 2019); Banshee (Dottir Press, 2019); Blind (Penguin Random House, 2015); Big Girl Small (FSG, 2011); Repeat After Me (The Overlook Press, 2009); and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton, 2005), about the years she spent in Beijing as the unlikely star of a Chinese soap opera. DeWoskin's poetry collection, Two Menus, was published by the University of Chicago Press' Phoenix Poetry Series in 2020, and Foreign Babes in Beijing and Banshee are being developed for TV. DeWoskin’s poems, essays, and articles have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Ploughshares, and New Voices from the Academy of American Poets. DeWoskin is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Arts at UChicago and an affiliated faculty member in Jewish and East Asian Studies.
Literary Arts Lab is a three-day festival of readings, panels, and Q&As featuring writers Eula Biss, Jennifer Croft, John Keene, Suketu Mehta, and Aisha Sabatini Sloan.
This event is sponsored by UChicago’s Program in Creative Writing and the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.
