Susan Choi is the author of the celebrated novel A Person of Interest. Her previous novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She is also the author of The Foreign Student, winner of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and is co-editor with David Remnick of the anthology Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she was born in 1969 and lives in Brooklyn.
David Friedman was born and raised in Washington, D.C, and educated at Cornell (B.A., English) and Columbia (M.A., English Literature) Universities. Friedman won the 2004 National Poetry Series open competition, selected by Pulitzer Prizewinner Stephen Dunn; his book of prose poems, The Welcome, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2006 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. He presently lives and teaches in New York.
Charity Ketz was born in Roanoke, Virginia and grew up in State College, Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. from Penn State University, an M.F.A. from Cornell University, and has held lectureships at both universities. Her first book of poems, The Narcoleptic Yard, was published this year by Black Lawrence press; she has also published a chapbook, Locust in Bloom. A former fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Ketz is currently a PhD student in English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
The three read from their work on September 10, 2009, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.