Novelist Alexander Chee guest edits a special issue of Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politicsfeaturing New Korean American Fiction and asks what it means to be Korean American. Come hear Alexander Chee, Catherine Chung, Elaine H. Kim, and Jin Yong Sohn read from stories published in the June 2008 issue of Guernica. This event is open to the public; $5 donation is suggested.

Alexander Chee was born in Rhode Island and grew up in Korea, Guam and Maine. A recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the NEA and the MacDowell Colony, Chee has been named as one of the 100 Most Influential People of the Year by Out Magazine. His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, The Asian American Writers Workshop Literature Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection. His second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2009. He teaches at Amherst College and blogs at Koreanish.

Catherine Chung lives in Rockville, MD and has an MFA from Cornell University. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Jentel and the MacDowell Colony, and a “waiter” scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is the recipient of a Pushcart nomination, and grants from the Lannan Foundation at SFAI, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation. Her work has appeared in The Journal.

Jin Young Sohn is currently a freshman at the Rhode Island School of Design studying Apparel Design. In his free time he enjoys reading, crocheting and drawing.

Elaine H. Kim has won fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. She has work published or forthcoming in So to Speak, upstreet, and Guernica, and was a finalist in the 2007 Storyquarterly Fall Fiction Contest. Elaine recently returned to New York from South Korea and currently lives in Brooklyn.