The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, in partnership with Yu & Me Books (NYC’s first Asian American woman-owned bookstore!), presents a reading and conversation with writer Vanessa Hua. Vanessa will join us to celebrate the publication of Forbidden City, a “grand, cinematic, captivating novel” (Cathy Park Hong), and will speak with writer Vanessa Chan.

Vanessa Hua is an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of the national bestseller A River of Stars, as well as Deceit and Other Possibilities, winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and NYT Editors Choice, and the forthcoming Forbidden City. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Asian American Journalists Association. She has filed stories from China, Burma, South Korea, Panama, and Ecuador, and her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She has taught, most recently, at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

Vanessa Chan is the Malaysian author of a debut novel, The Storm We Made, and a story collection, The Ugliest babies in the World – both forthcoming from Scribner. Her novel will be published in sixteen languages worldwide. Vanessa’s other work has been published in Electric Lit, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, among others, and she co-curates the 20-year old Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn.