Autobiography and Fiction with Electric Literature | August 16 | House Program

Susan’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and is in the process of being adapted into a film. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award.  

In 2010 Susan was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, will be published in April 2019 and her first book for children, Camp Tiger, will be published in May 2019. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, Susan teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn.

Photo credit: Heath Weston

Nada Alic is an LA-based writer and editor, originally from Toronto, Canada. Nada has published two collections of short fiction as a series entitled Future You, in collaboration with artist and painter, Andrea Nakhla. Future You has been featured in Urban Outfitters, Nasty Gal, Ephemera Magazine, Cool Hunting, It’s Nice That, Storychord, Metatron Press, Booooooom, People of Print and elsewhere. Stockists include Nike Women (Nordstrom Century City), Skylight Books, Pop Hop, Stories, Likely General and elsewhere. Nada’s most recent creative project under Future You, an animated short entitled “The Trick,” was chosen as a finalist for the 2019 GLAS Animation Festival in San Francisco. Nada is currently working on a new collection of fiction and is a regular contributor to such publications as Working Not Working Magazine, Booooooom, Hunker and elsewhere. Additionally, she is the organizer of an LA-based women writers’ group in collaboration with the literary site Girls At Library.

Mimi Wong is the Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine The Offing and New York desk editor for ArtAsiaPacific, the leading English-language periodical covering contemporary art and culture from Asia, the Pacific and the Middle East. Her work has also appeared in Catapult, Electric Literature, Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, and Refinery29. Born and raised in California’s Silicon Valley, she received her B.A. in English & American Literature from New York University with double minors in Creative Writing and Chinese. She is now based in Brooklyn.

Leanne Boschman is a prairie transplant to the West Coast. Her poems have appeared in Other Voices, Dandelion Magazine, Geist Magazine, Prism International, Room, Rhubarb, and Word Works. They have also been included in Creekstones: Anthology of Northern BC Poets, Half in the Sun: Anthology of Mennonite Writing, Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Writing, and Unfurled: Collected Poetry from Northern BC Women. Leanne’s first collection of poems entitled Precipitous Signs: A Rain Journal was published by Leaf Press in April 2009. Recently, she has branched out into writing fiction and creative non-fiction and is working on a memoir that explores learning from diverse angles. Leanne completed her PhD in the Languages, Cultures, and Literacies program in the Faculty of Education at SFU. She teaches English at the Justice Institute of British Columbia.

Morgan Thomas received an MFA from the University of Oregon in 2016. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, The Greensboro Review, Vice, and Ms. They’ve received support from the Penny Wilkes Scholarship for Writing and the Environment, the Fulbright Student Program, and Bread Loaf’s Work-Study Program. They live in Portland, Oregon.

I am a British Research-based storyteller, currently living in the Midwestern United States. My work engages environmental and industrial change over time and bridges the arts, sciences, and social sciences to tell stories that incorporate autobiography, fiction, and creative non-fiction in multiple storytelling forms. Recent work has included written and spoken word, video and audio story, sound, installation, and live performance. My current work focus is on the complex relationships and histories of horseshoe crabs, morphologically, agriculturally, medically, ethically, and the ways in which their lives are told in stories of sustainability and popular culture. I have an MFA in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), NY, and I’m about to receive a PhD in Interdisciplinary Arts and Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a certificate in Environmental History and the History of Science from the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies.

Sanchari Sur is a 2018 Lambda Literary Fellow in fiction, and has worked with Chinelo Okparanta during her fellowship. Her fiction, poetry, and criticism can be found in The Feminist Wire, Room, Toronto Book Award shortlisted The Unpublished City (Book*hug, 2017; ed. Dionne Brand), Arc Poetry Magazine, Humber Literary Review, Prism International, and elsewhere. Her theatre reviews are forthcoming in Rungh and alt.theatre. She is a PhD candidate in English at Wilfrid Laurier University, and her research focuses on the fiction and poetry of South Asian Canadian women. She also curates the Balderdash Reading Series in Waterloo, ON, and blogs at sursanchari.wordpress.com.

Conley Lyons is a 2017 Natalie Diaz Fellowship recipient from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. Her work has appeared in them., Bitch Planet: Triple Feature, and Athena's Daughters: Vol. 1. She has a B.A. in Literature and Creative Writing from Elon University. Lyons lives and writes in North Carolina.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji is the author of Port of Being (Invisible Publishing), which was a finalist for the 2019 BC Book Prizes (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize) and was named by CBC as a best Canadian poetry book of 2018. In 2017, it received the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2019, Best Canadian Poetry 2018, and Poetry Northwest. Her non-fiction and criticism are forthcoming in Carte Blanche, Music & Literature, Quill & Quire, and the Chicago Review of Books. In March 2019, she was a Writer in Residence for Open Book Canada, where she wrote columns for a series titled “Writer at Work,” discussing craft and politics. She is at work on an autofictional novel about addiction, saints, family, and diaspora.

Corinne Manning is a prose writer and literary organizer whose fiction has been widely published in journals such as Story Quarterly and Joyland. Corinne's essays have been anthologized in Toward an Ethics of Activism and Shadow Map: An anthology of Survivors of Sexual Assault. Corinne has received grants and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, 4 Culture, Artist Trust, and The Jack Straw Media Gallery. Once upon a time they founded and organized The James Franco Review, a project that attempted to reimagine the publishing process and address implicit bias in the industry.

Théodore Pavlich is a writer, theatre artist, and storyteller who has dedicated their life to hearing and telling stories, inspired by the power of storytelling to fuel cultural unity and growth. They're passionate about the use of storytelling in advocacy and have used their own stories of life as a transmasculine person to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. Théo is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at St. Mary's College of California where they are the 2020 Lambda Literary Fellow.