[VIRTUAL] PEN Out Loud: Marilynne Robinson with Alexander Chee

Award-winning author Marilynne Robinson joins PEN Out Loud to celebrate Jack, the fourth book in her now classic Gilead series, which have won one Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Critics Circle Awards. A novel that “resonates with all the paradoxes of American life, then and now,” it follows John Ames Boughton, the son of Gilead’s Presbyterian minister, who after War World II begins a heartrending interracial romance. One of today’s foremost writers, Robinson will be joined in conversation with bestselling author Alexander Chee to interrogate the complexities of American history.

This digital event will start at 8pm ET / 5pm PT.

Presented in collaboration with Strand Book Store and Scripps Presents.

ASL interpretive services are provided by ProBono ASL.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novels Jack, Lila, Home, Gilead (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and Housekeeping, and several nonfiction books, including When I Was a Child I Read Books, Mother Country, The Death of Adam, and Absence of Mind. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How to Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

He is a contributing editor at The New Republic and an editor-at-large at VQR. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewaneee Review, The Yale Review, and Guernica, among others, and anthologized in the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays.

He is the winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose, a 2010 MCCA Fellowship, The Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the 2018 One Story Magazine’s Mentor of the Year Award, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, and Civitella Ranieri.

He is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College.

About Strand Book Store

Located on 12th and Broadway in New York City, the Strand Book Store is a family-owned, iconic literary destination with more than 90 years of history and 18 miles of books to prove it. Its events feature some of today’s most interesting and provocative authors. Its unparalleled inventory of 2.5 million new, used, and rare books and locally designed totes, gifts, and apparel makes it easy and exciting to get lost in the stacks.

About Scripps Presents

Scripps Presents is an electrifying mix of storytellers and artists, policymakers and musicians—and everything in between. Based at Scripps College, Scripps Presents provides a forum the Claremont Colleges and audiences across Southern California to engage with eye-opening, mind-bending, genre-defying tête-à-têtes with the thinkers and doers, writers and performers, whose passions and perspectives are changing the way we see the world.

The New Republic is an official media partner of PEN Out Loud’s Fall 2020 season, and this program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the Austin Public Library Foundation, and Magic City Poetry Festival are regional partners for the fall 2020 season of PEN Out Loud.