Join Grace Talusan, winner of the 2017 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, at the Boston Book Festival. Grace will be appearing alongside author Ha Jin for an event entitled Where Do I Belong - the Experience of Immigration. Hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, this panel is devoted to exploring the immigrant experience through the eyes of a writer.   

Grace Talusan is a writer and writing teacher. As a child, she immigrated to the United States from the Philippines with her parents. She has published essays, longform journalism, fiction, and book reviews in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Magazine, Boston Globe, The Rumpus, and many others. She is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has been awarded residencies to Hedgebrook, Ragdale, and the Dune Shacks in Provincetown. She is a graduate of Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. At Tufts University, she teaches in the English Department and The Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. She is a longtime member and teacher at Grub Street, an independent creative writing center, and lives outside of Boston with her husband. Her debut novel, The Body Papers, will be published in the Fall of 2018 by Restless Books.

Xuefei Jin, who goes by the pen name Ha Jin, was born in China and first came to the United States in 1986 to begin his doctoral work at Brandeis. Jin won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1999 and the PEN/ Faulkner award in 2000. In 2005, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Jin currently teaches at Boston University.

The Christian Science Monitor is an independent, international news organization and is one of the program sponsors of the 2017 Boston Book Festival. 

The Boston Book Festival celebrates the power of words to stimulate, agitate, unite, delight, and inspire us by holding year-round events culminating in an annual, free Festival that promotes a culture of reading and ideas.

Where: Copley Square, Boston
When: Saturday, October 28, 2017