From left to right: Tessa Hulls, Jane Wong, Kimi Rutledge, Carla Crujido and Lucy Tan.
BOOK TALK WITH CARLA CRUJIDO, TESSA HULLS, LUCY TAN, & JANE WONG. MODERATED BY KIMI RUTLEDGE
Saturday, May 4, 2024
2 PM — 4 PM
Wing Luke Museum Tateuchi Story Theatre
Free. Register here.
Limited seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.
General Admission is not included.
Plan your visit here. For more information about accessibility, please contact visit@wingluke.org or call 206.623.5124
Writers Carla Crujido (The Strange Beautiful), Tessa Hulls (Feeding Ghosts), Lucy Tan (What We Were Promised), and Jane Wong (Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City) read and share from their recent books.
This is a live in-person program with Tessa Hulls zooming in for her presentation.
Moderator: Kimi Rutledge
Kimi Rutledge is an actor and artist based in Seattle. She most recently acted in Netflix’s “Obliterated.”
Authors:
Carla Crujido is the Nonfiction Editor at River Styx Magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and has had writing published in Moss, Bellingham Review, Crazyhorse, Yellow Medicine Review, Ricepaper Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Part vivid historical drama, part melancholy fever dream, The Strange Beautiful centers on Mount Vernon Apartments in Spokane, Washington, offering a glimpse into the lives of ten tenants over a period of one hundred years.
Tessa Hulls is an artist, writer, and adventurer who is equally likely to disappear into a research library or the wilderness. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Adventure Journal, and her comics have been published in The Rumpus, City Arts, and The Margins. She has been awarded grants from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, 4Culture, and the Robert B McMillen Foundation, and received the Washington Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award. For the last almost-decade, she has focused on creating Feeding Ghosts (forthcoming March 5 from MCD Books), a graphic memoir that traces three generations of women in her family across a backdrop of Chinese history to explore the complicated ways that mothers and daughters both damage and save one another.
Feeding Ghosts is a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, Feeding Ghosts exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.
Lucy Tan is author of the novel What We Were Promised, which was a Barnes & Nobles Discover Pick, a Washington Post Best Book of 2018, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Originally from New Jersey, Lucy lives and writes in Seattle.
From a silk-producing village in rural China, to corporate America, and back again to the post-Maoist nouveaux riches of modern Shanghai, the characters in What We Were Promised explore the question of what we owe to our country, our families, and ourselves.
Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023). She also wrote two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). She grew up in a take-out restaurant on the Jersey shore and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.
From her father's gambling addiction to finding illegal dentists in NYC's Chinatown, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City is "a memoir that celebrates as much as it grieves, rages, and broods" (The Washington Post). Filled with beauty found in unexpected places, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City is a resounding love song of the Asian American working class, a portrait of how we become who we are, and a story of lyric wisdom to hold and to share.