Full program video: R.O. Kwon and Nona Caspers: March 20, 2019
Video highlight clips: Nona Caspers reads an excerpt from The Fifth Woman | R.O. Kwon reads an excerpt from The Incendiaries | R.O. Kwon and Nona Caspers, with Carolina De Robertis, discourse on a love of language and the specificity of certain terms
A special Wednesday evening devoted to new fiction, with acclaimed novelist R.O. Kwon and Nona Caspers, reading from their work and talking with one another and the audience. Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, this event is free and open to the public.
R.O. Kwon is the author of The Incendiaries, published by Riverhead (U.S.) and Virago (U.K.). The Incendiaries was an American Booksellers Association Indie Next #1 Great Read and Indies Introduce selection, and it is being translated into four languages. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Noon, Time, Playboy, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Born in South Korea, she has mostly lived in the United States.
Nona Caspers' new book The Fifth Woman, a Novel in Stories (Sarabande Books, 2018) was selected by Stacy D’erasmo for the Mary McCarthy Award. Her story, "The Party" (aka "Frontiers") was selected by Best American Short Stories as a "Distinguished Story of 2016." Caspers’ other books of fiction include Heavier Than Air, awarded the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and listed as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and Little Book of Days. In 2013 she co-edited with Joell Hallowell a book of queer women oral histories, Lawfully Wedded Wives: Rethinking Marriage in the 21st Century. Her work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant, Barbara Deming Memorial Grant and Award, a LAMBDA Literary Award nomination, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award. Stories have appeared in numerous literary reviews, including Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Ontario Review, and The Sun. She is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University and lives in San Francisco.