The 2020-2021 Ten Evenings schedule was recently announced and it includes authors Susan Choi and Ocean Vuong. Susan Choi is scheduled for September 14:
The author of five novels, Susan Choi won the 2019 National Book Award for Trust Exercise, an ingenious meditation on fiction and truth, friendships and loyalties, the capacities of adolescents, and the powers of adults.And Ocean Vuong on March 22, 2021:
In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls — until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down.
Choi’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 was adapted into a film. A Person of Interest was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010, Choi was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award.
Ocean Vuong is an award-winning poet and the author of the critically acclaimed bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a brilliant, heartbreaking family portrait – a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling.Tickets will go on sale July 6.
Framed as a letter from a son to his mother who cannot read, this shattering portrait of a Vietnamese family, first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling asks how to survive, how to find joy in darkness, and the meaning of American identity. With stunning urgency and grace, Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are.
Vuong erupted onto the literary scene with his first poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, for which he became only the second debut poet to win the T. S. Eliot Prize. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards and longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award. In 2019, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the youngest recipient of the grant in that year’s class.
