Calling all members of PEN America!
Reading one of Jennifer Egan’s works of fiction is like taking a crash course in character. In her latest work, The Candy House—where each chapter is told from a different perspective—voice and narrative build on one another to create a world of fully-realized personalities, each ferrying their own, complicated history. While this world and its momentum feel effortless, good readers—especially those who aspire to write equally good stories—are struck with the inevitable question, “How on earth does she do it?”
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former PEN America President Jennifer Egan joins our Membership Engagement Manager Aleah Gatto in a free, member-exclusive webinar to explore the power of character-building in craft. The conversation will be followed by an audience Q&A. To register for this special event, visit the password-protected PEN America Member Benefits page:
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participants
Jennifer Egan’s 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, has been awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She is also the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel which became a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, The Keep, and A Visit From the Goon Squad, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize, and was recently named one of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her new novel, The Candy House, a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, also a Times bestseller, was named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama’s favorite reads of the year. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine; her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and “The Bipolar Kid” received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Her year-long reporting on street homelessness and supportive housing in New York City was published in The New Yorker in September, 2023. She has served as President of PEN America and twice as Artist-in-Residence in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught courses in 19th and 20th Century literature.
Aleah Gatto is the Membership Engagement Manager at PEN America, where she carries out projects that bolster benefits for members and build capacity for the organization. Previously, Gatto served as an AmeriCorps member at the Community Technology Empowerment Project in Minnesota, where she worked to bridge the digital divide by teaching digital literacy workshops and maintaining programs that promote digital equity. A Phi Beta Kappa scholar, Gatto graduated from The University of Vermont in 2019, earning a double degree in Italian Studies and English with a concentration in Writing. Her works of poetry and prose have been published in Aerie International Magazine, Apprentice Writer, Jet Fuel Review, and Orange Island Arts.
