In this one-of-a-kind event, two contemporary leaders in the short-story genre will read from their most recent work and offer insights into this unique form. Yiyun Li (Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories) is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants. A native of Beijing, she is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers' Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named Li one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories, among others. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl reveals cultures both traditional and modern, creating a mesmerizing and vibrant landscape of life. Sallie Bingham (Mending: New and Selected Stories) published her first novel with Houghton Mifflin in 1961. Since then she has published four collections of short stories, four novels, and a memoir. She was book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, and a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the founder of The Kentucky Foundation for Women. Of Mending, the New York Times Book Review writes, "Sallie Bingham binds her collection together with sheer talent. The title novella is absolutely first-rate - a skillfully suggestive amalgam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty."
