Event
A BOOK LAUNCH FOR WEIKE WANG'S JOAN IS OKAY
A reading and Q&A, with Weike Wang and special guest Sully Burns
Sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program
Deceptively spare yet quietly powerful and laced with sharp humor, Joan Is Okay — the new novel by Weike Wang — touches on matters that feel deeply resonant: being Chinese-American right now; working in medicine at a high-stakes time; finding one's voice within a dominant culture; being a woman in a male-dominated workplace; and staying independent within a tight-knit family. But above all, it's a portrait of one remarkable woman so surprising that you can't get her out of your head.
WEIKE WANG is the author of Chemistry (Knopf 2017) and the forthcoming Joan is Okay (Random House 2022). She is the recipient of the 2018 Pen Hemingway, a Whiting award and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares and The New Yorker, among other publications. She is in the 2019 Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prizes. She earned her MFA from Boston University and her other degrees from Harvard. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
SULLY BURNS is a Senior at Penn from Philadelphia, studying creative writing. He is currently writing his Senior thesis, a collection of short stories, for this spring. He loves writing fiction grounded in themes of food, city, and humor.