Award-winning Author Min Jin Lee Visits HVCC on April 13

April 5, 2023

She is known for both her widely-published essays and monumental novels

National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee, a prolific essayist and the author of two, acclaimed novels, will visit Hudson Valley Community College on Thursday, April 13, to discuss her writing and rising career. Beginning at 11 a.m. in the Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium on the Troy campus, the event will include time for audience questions and a book signing. It is free to the public.

Min Jin Lee’s fiction explores the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and identity of displaced people. Her second novel, “Pachinko” is an epic story that follows four generations of a Korean family that migrates to Japan in the early 1900s. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2017. Lee is currently adapting her debut novel, “Free Food for Millionaires” (2007), for a Netflix series.

The 2022 Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, named for the 20th-century South Korean Buddhist reformer and poet, is one of her many literary awards. Her short works and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, NPR’s Selected Shorts, One Story, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Condé Nast Traveler, The Times of London, Food & Wine, Vogue and The Wall Street Journal.

Lee earned fiction fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She studied history at Yale College, law at Georgetown University, and practiced law for two years before turning to writing. Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea and immigrated to Queens with her family when she was seven years old. She currently teaches fiction and essay writing at Amherst College and lives in New York City.

The April 13 event is presented by the Cultural Affairs Program in collaboration with the English, Foreign Languages and English as a Second Language Department at HVCC.

Contact Debby Gardner at d.gardner@hvcc.edu or (518) 629-8071 for more information. If you require reasonable accommodation, please contact the Center for Access and Assistive Technology at caat@hvcc.edu, (518) 629-7154, TDD (518) 629-7596.