Novelist Gish Jen: Annual McKinney Contest Guest Speaker

Gish Jen, one of America’s greatest storytellers, is the author of the new book, Thank You, Mr. Nixon (2022), a collection of stories that, together, constitute “a fictional journey through U.S.-China relations, capturing the excitement of a world on the brink of tectonic change.”

7 p.m. Wednesday April 12
Reading and McKinney Writing Contest Awards
EMPAC Building, Rensselaer (RPI),
110 8th Street, Troy NY 12180

The New Yorker named Thank You, Mr. Nixon a “Best Book of the Year,” and Booklist said, “Jen distills five decades of cultural collision, confusion, and collaboration between the U.S. and China into 11 gorgeously comedic and heartbreaking stories.”

Her most recent novel was The Resisters (2020), a tale of dystopia, climate change, and baseball that Esquire named one of the “Top 50 Sci-Fi Books of All Time.”
Sponsored by the Mary A. Earl McKinney Endowment; Rensselaer Union; School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; Rensselaer’s Department of Communication and Media; Friends of Folsom Library; and the NYS Writers Institute.