Boris Kachka

Kachka is the books editor for the L.A. Times. Prior to the Times, he was books editor at New York magazine. During his time there, he was an early stalwart of the magazine’s inventive “Culture” section; reported features on authors including Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Harper Lee; and investigated turmoil at various cultural and media institutions, including the New York Times, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and WNYC. Kachka is also the author of several books, including “Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus and Giroux” and “Becoming a Veterinarian.”

Chang-rae Lee

Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, as well as On Such a Full Sea, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His newest novel is My Year Abroad. Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Stanford University.

Skylight Books

Please support our local bookseller for this panel. Signed bookplates available from Meng Jin, Sanjena Sathian, Imbolo Mbue (signed copies) with your book purchase. Order now!

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Meng Jin

Meng Jin was born in Shanghai and lives in San Francisco. A Kundiman Fellow, she is a graduate of Harvard and Hunter College. Little Gods is her debut novel and is a finalist for the L.A. Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

Imbolo Mbue

Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Behold the Dreamers,” which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Blue Metropolis Words to Change Prize and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and a notable book of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post . The novel has been translated into eleven languages, adapted into an opera and a stage play, and optioned for a movie. Her just-released new novel is “How Beautiful We Were.” A native of Limbe, Cameroon, and a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia Universities, Mbue lives in New York City.

Sanjena Sathian

A Paul and Daisy Soros fellow, Sanjena Sathian is a 2019 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has worked as a reporter in Mumbai and San Francisco, with nonfiction bylines for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Food & Wine, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, and more. And her award-winning short fiction has been published in Boulevard, Joyland, Salt Hill, and The Master’s Review. Gold Diggers is her first novel.