AG Literary Events
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
6:30 pm Eastern
McNally Jackson Seaport, 4 Fulton St, New York, New York
You can borrow my story, but you have to use my voice.
Join novelists Xochitl Gonzalez (Olga Dies Dreaming, Anita de Monte Laughs Last) and Claire Jiménez (What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez) for an intimate conversation on the greatest of themes—family, love, death, art, ghosts, and New York City.
When Jiménez won this year’s PEN / Faulkner Award, the judges praised her fiction as being “full of nuance, humor, and humanity—a complex portrait of resilience with an exquisite deployment of language.” One of those judges was Xochitl Gonzalez, whose own work is “as funny as it is insightful, and as deft as it is original,” writes Mat Johnson. “She displays a gift for capturing the absurdity in the fabric of life. Wit and wisdom rarely combine in such a powerful one-two punch.”
This event is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Authors Guild Foundation and McNally Jackson, where we gather writers for conversations that highlight the importance of a rich, diverse literary culture and the authors who contribute to it, and provide a space for writers and readers to connect in-person.
Xochitl Gonzalez is the New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming. Named a Best of 2022 by the New York Times, TIME, Kirkus, Washington Post, and NPR, Olga Dies Dreaming was the winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Fiction and The New York City Book Awards. A Reese’s Book Club Pick, her new novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, was published in March 2024. As a staff writer for the Atlantic, she was recognized as a 2023 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. A native Brooklynite and proud public-school graduate, she holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Claire Jiménez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island. She is the author of the short-story collection Staten Island Stories and What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez, which won the 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award. She received her M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University and her PhD in English with specializations in Ethnic Studies and Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In 2019, she co-founded the Puerto Rican Literature Project, a digital archive documenting the lives and work of hundreds of Puerto Rican writers from over the last century. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina.
