More than 500,000 immigrants from 80 different countries landed at the Angel Island Immigration Station from 1910-1940. Today, the Angel Island Immigration Station stands as a symbol of the diaspora - the dispersion of people from their original homeland - that happened then and continues in our contemporary world. Through this event, we explore how that diasporic experience touches us through literature.
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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Chang-rae Lee, who emigrated from Korea to the United States when he was three, is the author of the novels Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, Aloft, The Surrendered (winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist), and On Such A Full Sea, (which was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). His sixth novel will be published in 2019. He is currently the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford University. Lee’s numerous awards and citations include the Dos Passos Prize in Literature, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Literary Award, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, and the NAIBA Book Award for Fiction. He has written stories and articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, Conde Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, and many other publications. He was named by The New Yorker as one of the 20 Writers for the 21st Century.
Eavan Boland, a native of Dublin, Ireland, moved with her family to London when she was six, where she first faced anti-Irish sentiment. Boland’s poetry collections include A Poet’s Dublin, A Woman Without a Country, New Collected Poems, An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987, and In Her Own Image. She is also the author of the essay collection A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, which won the 2012 PEN Award; Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, a volume of prose; and After Every War, an anthology of German women poets. With Mark Strand, she co-edited The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. Boland’s awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, a Jacob’s Award for her involvement in The Arts Programme broadcast on RTÉ Radio, and an honorary degree from Trinity. Boland is the Melvin and Bill Lane Professor of English at Stanford University.