November 16, 2023, 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
E. J. Koh and Robert Lashley, both participants in the 2016 Jack Straw Writers Program as poets, read from their new novels, The Liberators and I Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer.
E. J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others, which won a Washington State Book Award, Pacific Northwest Book Award, Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. Koh is also the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love, a Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry Winner. Her work has appeared in AGNI, the Atlantic, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, and elsewhere. Koh earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Creative Writing and Literary Translation and her PhD at the University of Washington in English Language and Literature studying Korean American literature, history, and film. Koh has received National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, American Literary Translators Association, and Kundiman fellowships. Her debut novel The Liberators is out now.
Robert Lashley was a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow, and a nominee for a Stranger Genius Award. His books include Green River Valley (Blue Cactus Press, 2021), Up South (Small Doggies Press, 2017), and The Homeboy Songs (Small Doggies Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review of Books, NAILED, Poetry Northwest, McSweeney’s, and The Cascadia Review, among others. In 2019, Entropy named The Homeboy Songs one of the 25 essential books to come out of Seattle. I Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer is his first novel.
