LOSS AND LIFE: CREATING STORIES OF HUMAN SURVIVAL

Julia Alvarez is a Dominican American author and poet, known for her novels How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies. In 2013, Alvarez received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama in recognition of her “extraordinary storytelling.” Her latest book is Afterlife, the first adult novel in almost fifteen years! "[Alvarez] reaps the fruits of her earlier literary efforts . . . Afterlife is anchored not just in easy humor and sharp observation, but in her fine-tuned sense for the intimacies of immigrant sisterhood.”
—The New York Times Book Review

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is a Vietnamese author and poet known for her writing about injustice and war and her call for peace and equality. She is regarded as one of Vietnam’s foremost contemporary poets. Her latest work is not only her debut novel, but also her first book published in English, The Mountains Sing. This novel has received high praise and tells a multigenerational tale of a Vietnamese family, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War.

"A luminous, complex family narrative ... Quế Mai [has] an astute and graceful ability to sustain contradictory truths about war, displacement, aesthetic representations, and human nature."—NPR