Lit Prize Post-Script Readings: Threa Almontaser & Jenny Zhang, with Christian Lorentzen
In this series, past winners and nominees of Brooklyn Public Library’s Literary Prize read and discuss their work. This time, it's Threa Almontaser and Jenny Zhang.
By turns aggressively reckless and fiercely protective, always guided by faith and ancestry, 2021 BPL Lit Prize winner Threa Almontaser’s incendiary debut asks how mistranslation can be a form of self-knowledge and survival. A love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and an extraordinarily composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before, Almontaser’s polyvocal collection sneaks artifacts to and from worlds, repurposing language and adapting to the space between cultures. In doing so, The Wild Fox of Yemen fearlessly rides the tension between carnality and tenderness in the unruly human spirit.
Almontaser reads with 2018 finalist Jenny Zhang, who was shortlisted for her riveting book of stories, Sour Heart, and who will also read from her new work. A fresh new voice emerges with the arrival of Sour Heart, establishing Jenny Zhang as a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant experience in America. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In the absence of grown-ups, latchkey kids experiment on each other until one day the experiments turn violent; an overbearing mother abandons her artistic aspirations to come to America but relives her glory days through karaoke; and a shy loner struggles to master English so she can speak to God.
Threa Almontaser is the author of the poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf Press 2021), winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American poets and nominated for the National Book Awards.
Jenny Zhang is the author of the story collection Sour Heart and the poetry collection My Baby First Birthday.
Moderator Christian Lorentzen is a critic and actor. His work appears in the London Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, the Financial Times, and Forever.
