Tomorrow! "The Origin and the Distance"

Tomorrow (Weds. 7/1) I'll be appearing on a panel at the Korea Society with the novelists Janice Y.K. Lee (The Piano Teacher) and Sung J. Woo (Everything Asian), discussing what it means to be a Korean American fiction writer...There's a reception at 6, and the event proper starts at 6:30.



More info from the Korea Society site:

A growing number of Korean American authors have found both critical and commercial success in the past decade. Does this "literary wave" mean that Americans of Korean origin have successfully moved from the margins to the mainstream of American literature, writing simply as a "writers" and not as "ethnic writers?" Join us for a literary conversation with novelists Ed Park, Janice Y.K. Lee, and Sung J. Woo, as they discuss issues of acculturation, isolation, cultural alienation, race and class, in relation to their own works.

$10 for members and students, $20 for nonmembers
(Walk-in registration will incur an additional charge of $5.)
Buy tickets
For more information or to register for the program, contact Patrick Clair at 212-759-7525, ext. 328, or emailThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

About the Authors

Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer, a four-time finalist for the National Magazine Award. His novel, Personal Days (Random House, 2008), was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. He writes a monthly book-review column for the Los Angeles Times and contributes to many other publications, including the New York Times, Bookforum, and Modern Painters. He was an editor and writer at The Village Voice for many years, where he was also the editor of the Voice Literary Supplement. Park teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

Janice Y. K. Lee was born and raised in Hong Kong, where she currently lives, and went to boarding school in the United States before attending Harvard College. A graduate of Hunter College's MFA program and a freelance writer, she is a former features editor at Elle and Mirabella magazines in New York. Her critically acclaimed first novel, The Piano Teacher, a New York Times bestseller and Richard and Judy Summer Read pick. The book will be published in 23 languages.

Sung J. Woo’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and KoreAm Journal. His debut novel, Everything Asian (Thomas Dunne Books, 2009) has received praises from the Christian Science Monitor, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews. His short story “Limits” was an Editor’s Choice winner in Carve Magazine’s 2008 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. A graduate of Cornell University with an MFA from New York University, he lives in Washington, New Jersey.


The Korea Society
950 Third Avenue @ 57th Street, 8th Floor
(Building entrance on SW corner of
Third Avenue and 57th Street)