The University of Connecticut’s Creative Writing Program is pleased to announce the 3rd annual Mark Twain Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Program. This year’s distinguished writer is Darien Hsu Gee, author of Friendship Bread and Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World. Gee will read from her work at 6:30 PM on Thursday, October 12, 2023 at the UConn Bookstore-Storrs Center.
Darien Hsu Gee is the author of five novels published by Penguin Random House that have been translated into eleven languages. In 2021, her collection of micro essays, Allegiance, received the Bronze IPPY award in the Essays category. She also received a 2019 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship award for Other Small Histories and the 2015 Hawai‘i Book Publishers’ Ka Palapala Poʻokela Award of Excellence for Writing the Hawai‘i Memoir. She is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant and a Vermont Studio Center fellowship. In 2022, she served as executive editor for the anthology, Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World. Gee holds a B.A. from Rice University and an M.F.A. from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She lives with her family on the Big Island of Hawai‘i and serves as co-founder and series editor for Haliʻa Aloha, a micro memoir writing and hybrid publishing program. She currently serves on the Hawaiʻi Island Leadership Council for the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation. Past board positions include the Friends and Foundation of the San Francisco Public Library, ZYZZYVA, and the Kahilu Theatre.
The reading is free and open to the public. This event is sponsored by the Bloom Endowment Fund, the Creative Writing Program, and the UCONN Bookstore. The UConn Bookstore is located at 1 Royce Circle, Storrs, Connecticut 06269, 860-486-8525.
For more information, contact: Sophia Buckner at sophia.buckner@uconn.edu