T118.
Fictionalizing Marginalized Histories: India, Jamaica, Japan, USA
Thursday, February 8, 2024
9:00 am to 10:15 am
Four fiction writers of color discuss how they researched and wrote multivoiced, multigenerational books drawing from both archival records and family lore, as well as the politics surrounding it. How do the novel and short story form lend themselves to the retelling of marginalized histories? Where and why do these writers blur the line between “truth” and fiction? How do they grapple with representing presumed stereotypes (e.g., “bad mothers,” slavery, and Black trauma)?
Participants
Asako Serizawa is the author of Inheritors, which won the PEN/Open Book Award and The Story Prize Spotlight Award. She has received two O. Henry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, NEA, and MacDowell.
Kim Coleman Foote is the author of Coleman Hill, a novel inspired by her family's Great Migration experience. She has received writing fellowships from the NEA, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Center for Fiction, and NYFA, and she holds an MFA in creative writing from Chicago State University.
Maisy Card is the author of the novel These Ghosts are Family, which won an American Book Award, the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize in fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
Shilpi Suneja was born in India. She is the author of the novel House of Caravans. Her writing has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship, and a Grub Street Novel Incubator scholarship.
