This event was recorded on May 22, 2023, at TACAW as part of the Aspen Words 2023 Writers in Residence series, in partnership with Aspen Public Radio.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jean Chen Ho is the author of “Fiona and Jane,” named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2022. Her writing appears in New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Times, Georgia Review and elsewhere. She is the 2023 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Scripps College. Jean is a Kundiman fellow and has been a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook, I-Park Foundation, MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center and others. She was a 2019-20 W.M. Keck and George & Arlene Cheng Research Fellow at the Huntington Library, where she worked on an archival project on gender and racial violence in 19th-century Los Angeles Chinatown (the subject of her next book). Jean is a board member at Kaya Press, an independent publisher of experimental writing from the Asian Pacific Islander diaspora. Born in Taiwan and raised in Southern California, she currently lives in Los Angeles.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR
Mitzi Rapkin is the host and producer of the literary podcast, First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing. For the last eight years, Mitzi has read a book a week and interviewed the author. First Draft features fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and essay writers. With a specific focus on craft, Rapkin and her guests explore the decisions and psychology that went into the book being discussed, the themes of a writer’s work, and questions focused on the human experience. George Saunders said Rapkin “is one of the most talented and passionate interviewers in the world. What makes her great is her precision and her genuine curiosity, which transforms the interview into an urgent conversation. The time flies by, and I always learn something new about my own work.”