PEN Out Loud: Patricia Engel + Jean Chen Ho

Join celebrated authors Patricia Engel and Jean Chen Ho for an outdoor evening of readings and conversation exploring their latest works of fiction. Patricia Engel, author of the bestselling novel Infinite Country, will read from and discuss her exquisite new collection of haunting short stories, The Faraway World, set across the Americas. 

This in-person program will be co-presented by Diesel, A Bookstore, and is made possible in part by the support of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.

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Patricia Engel is the author of Infinite Country, a New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club selection; The Veins of the Ocean, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award; and Vida, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway and Young Lions Fiction Awards, New York Times Notable Book, and winner of Colombia’s national book award, the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories appear in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Born to Colombian parents, and herself a dual citizen, Patricia is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Miami.

Author photo by Julian Sambrano, Jr.

Jean Chen Ho is the author of Fiona and Jane, named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2022. Her writing appears in New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Times, Georgia Review, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Guernica, and elsewhere. Jean is the 2023 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Scripps College. She is a doctoral candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at USC, and she holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Jean is a Kundiman fellow, and has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, Tin House, I-Park Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center. In 2019-20, she was the W.M. Keck and George & Arlene Cheng Research Fellow at the Huntington Library, where she worked on an archival project on gender and racial violence in 19th-century Los Angeles Chinatown (the subject of her next book project). Jean is a board member at Kaya Press, an independent publisher of experimental writing from the Asian Pacific Islander diaspora. Born in Taiwan and raised in Southern California, she currently lives in Los Angeles. 

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