SHUBHA SUNDER
Shubha Sunder's debut short story collection, Boomtown Girl, won the St. Lawrence Book Award and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. She has published stories and essays in New Letters, The Common, Narrative Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Catapult, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Her fiction has received honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories, won the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize and Narrative "30 Below," and been shortlisted for The Flannery O’Connor Award, The Hudson Prize, and The New American Fiction Prize. She is a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and the City of Boston Artist Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at GrubStreet and at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
SESSION: The Two-World Problem: Challenges and Opportunities in Writing Immigrant Stories
Do you move between cultures, languages, and places in your fiction? When you’re writing immigrant characters, how do their pasts, presents, and futures intersect with the places they or their families came from? And how do you integrate many worlds, some of them contradictory, into one seamless narrative? In this session, we will explore the peculiar delights and possibilities of immigrant fiction, guided by the works of world-renowned writers V. S. Naipaul, Sigrid Nunez, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Through discussion, Q&A, and perhaps a writing exercise or two, as time allows, we will focus on such elements as the role of memory, the interplay between the ancestral and adopted homeland, and the power of the outsider perspective in telling an immigrant tale.