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This panel serves as the kick-off event for the Literary Arts Lab: Art & Trouble. Daisy Hernández, Chang-rae Lee, Antoine Wilson, and Jeffrey Yang talk Art & Trouble.
Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease, which won the 2022 PEN /Jean Stein Book Award and was selected as an inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. She is also the author of the award-winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed andcoeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. Daisy is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Northwestern University.
Chang-rae Lee is the author of six novels: Native Speaker (1995), A Gesture Life (1999), Aloft (2004), The Surrendered (2010), which was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, On Such a Full Sea (2014) which was a Finalist for the NBCC and won the Heartland Fiction Prize, and his most recent novel, My Year Abroad (2021). His works have won numerous awards and citations, including the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Literary Award, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2021, he was recognized for lifetime achievement in the Novel with an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as elected as a Member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Antoine Wilson is the author of the novel Mouth to Mouth, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Prix Fitzgerald and the California Independent Booksellers Award, and was featured on Barack Obama’s 2022 Summer Reading List. It was also named a best book of the year by both Time and NPR. Antoine is also the author of the novels Panorama City and The Interloper. His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, The Los Angeles Times, and Best New American Voices, among other publications, and he is a contributing editor of the literary magazine A Public Space. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin, he lives in Los Angeles.
Jeffrey Yang is the author of four books of poetry: Line and Light, Hey, Marfa (winner of the Southwest Book Award); Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium (winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. He is the translator of Bei Dao’s autobiography City Gate, Open Up, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies, Ahmatjan Osman’s Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile, Su Shi’s East Slope, and an anthology of classical Chinese poetry Rhythm 226. He has edited the poetry anthologies Birds, Beasts, and Seas and Time of Grief, a volume of Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose, The Sea Is a Continual Miracle, and an expanded edition of Mary Oppen’s Meaning a Life: An Autobiography. Yang has received fellowships from the DAAD artists-in-Berlin program, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Omina Freundeshilfe Foundation. He edits books for New Directions Publishing and New York Review Books.
Literary Arts Lab: Art and Trouble is a two-day festival of public readings, panels, craft talks, and Q&As featuring writers Daisy Hernández, Chang-rae Lee, Antoine Wilson, and Jeffrey Yang in conversation with UChicago faculty, students, and community members. Come join us as we explore the intersections between art, trouble, imagination, and writing craft. Free and open to everyone.