Everyone’s a Critic: Creative Writers Writing Criticism
Date
April 17, 2025
Time
7:30 pm – 8:30 pm
Location
Dodge Hall, Room 401
Sponsored by the Asian American Diasporic Writers Series at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and the Columbia University School of the Arts Writing MFA Program
*Non-CUID holders will have to register in advance for campus access
Panelists:
Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean-American writer and author of the novel The Evening Hero, which looks at the future of medicine, immigration, North Korea. She graduated from Brown University and was a Writer in Residence there, before she began teaching at Columbia University’s Writing Division. She is one of the few journalists who have been allowed to travel to North Korea since the Korean War.
Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Emancipator, and The Guardian, among others. She was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing and has received many honors for her work, including an O. Henry honorable mention, the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, and New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. She is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.
Rebecca Morgan Frank’s fourth collection of poems is Oh You Robot Saints!, and her poems and criticism appear in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. She serves on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle and is an assistant professor at Lewis University in Illinois.
Dr. Jonathan Leal is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California and serves on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle. He is the author of Dreams in Double Time, co-editor of Cybermedia, and co-creator of numerous acclaimed musical projects. An interdisciplinary critic and award-winning musician born and raised at the Texas-Mexico border, Leal focuses on music and storytelling as vehicles for communal memory, resistance, and experimentation.
Rishi Reddi is the author of the novel Passage West, a Los Angeles Times “Best California Book of 2020” and Karma and Other Stories, which received the 2008 L.L. Winship /PEN New England Award for Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, been broadcast on NPR, and earned honorable mention in the Pushcart Prize. Her reviews, essays and translations have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews, LitHub, Partisan Review, Alta Journal, and Air/Light, among others. Rishi has received fellowships and grants from the National Book Critics Circle, MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the U.S. Department of State. She lives in Cambridge, MA.
