Gish Jen & Helen Simonson (2011)

This event took place on December 12th 2011 at 7:30 in the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Jen's first book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Simonson's debut novel was named a New York times Best-seller. Reception and book signing to follow.

Gish Jen has published short work in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and dozens of other periodicals, anthologies and textbooks. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories four times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, her work was featured in a PBS American Masters’ special on the American novel and is widely taught.

Jen is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living; she has also delivered the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. THE RESISTERS is her eighth book.

Helen Simonson is the New York Times bestselling author of Major Pettigrew's last Stand (2010) and The Summer Before The War (2016). She was born in England and spent her teenage years in a small village near Rye, in East Sussex. A graduate of the London School of Economics with an MFA from Stony Brook Southampton, she is a former travel advertising executive who has lived in America for the last three decades. A US citizen, Helen is a longtime resident of Brooklyn where she lives with her husband and their elderly pug, SirJJ. She has two grown sons.