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Brookline Booksmith’s Transnational Literature Series will feature Grace Talusan, who will speak her Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing–winning memoir, The Body Papers, with Prize judges Ilan Stavans, Publisher of Restless Books, and Anjali Singh of Ayesha Pande Literary Agency. Join the conversation on May 23rd.

Grace Talusan was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. A graduate of Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine, she is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Talusan teaches the Essay Incubator at GrubStreet and at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts. She is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University for 2019–2021. The Body Papers, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, is her first book.

Anjali Singh started her career in publishing in 1996 as a literary scout. Most recently Editorial Director at Other Press, she has also worked as an editor at Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Vintage Books. She is best known for having championed Marjane Satrapi's Persepolisafter stumbling across it on a visit to Paris. She has always been drawn to the thrill of discovering new writers, and among the literary novelists whose careers she helped launch are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Samantha Hunt, and Saleem Haddad. Some of her editorial nonfiction projects include Baz Dreisinger's Incarceration Nations, Diana Abu-Jaber's The Language of Baklava, Kathy Rich's Dreaming in Hindi, Minal Hajratwala's Leaving India, Nuha al-Radi's Baghdad Diaries, and Igort's The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks. She is currently a literary agent at Ayesha Pande Literary, where she recently sold the YA graphic novel Jabsby Sherine Hamdy and Myra El-Mir, the coming-of-age story of a Muslim American girl, to Dial Books for Young Readers. She is a member of the International Committee of the Brooklyn Book Festival.

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and the publisher of Restless Books. An award-winning essayist, translator, and cultural commentators, his best-selling titles include On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language, Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language, Love and Language, A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States, El Iluminado, and Quixote: The Novel and the World.

Where: Brookline Booksmith

When: May 16, 2019