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Each season BKBF presents debut authors, who we want to shine the light on for our audience. This year we introduce novelists Priyanka Champaneri (The City of Good Death), Tom Lin (The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu), and Dariel Suarez (The Playwright’s House). Acclaimed author, Jonathan Lethem, will introduce the debut authors and talk about his own debut experience some 40 books ago.

When: October 3 at 1 pm Eastern
Where: Who? New at Brooklyn Book Festival (live!)

Priyanka Champaneri received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts numerous times. She received the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for The City of Good Death, her first novel.

Tom Lin was born in China and immigrated to the United States when he was four. A graduate of Pomona College, he is currently in the PhD program at the University of California, Davis. The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu is his first novel.

Dariel Suarez was born in Havana, Cuba, and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1997. His debut story collection, A Kind of Solitude, received the 2017 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and the 2019 International Latino Book Award for Best Collection of Short Stories. Dariel is an inaugural City of Boston Artist Fellow and Education Director at GrubStreet. His prose has appeared in numerous publications, including the Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, the Kenyon Review, and the Caribbean Writer, where he was awarded the First Lady Cecile de Jongh Literary Prize. Dariel earned his MFA in Fiction at Boston University and currently resides in the Boston area with his wife and daughter.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of twelve novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City. His fifth, Motherless Brooklyn, won the National Book Critic's Circle Award. His most recent is The Arrest. He was also the Brooklyn Book Festival 2015 BoBi Honoree.

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