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Award-winning Brooklyn author Lisa Ko coming to Greenlight to discuss best-selling novel

Brooklyn BookBeat

April 11, 2018 Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Lisa Ko. Images courtesy of Algonquin Books
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Brooklyn Event: Wednesday, May 2 7:30pm

Greenlight Bookstore-Fort Greene

In Conversation with Heather Abel

Lisa Ko’s uncompromising, timely debut novel “The Leavers” not only won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction — awarded by Barbara Kingsolver to a novel that addresses contemporary issues of social justice — last year, but was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Awards. Ko’s penetrating and emotionally rich work courageously tackles rarely talked about subtleties behind larger issues of immigration and adoption as it looks at questions of what it means to belong. Garnering tremendous critical acclaim nationwide, “The Leavers” became one of the best books of 2017.

The Brooklyn-based author, whose work has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, Apogee Journal, Narrative, Copper Nickel, Storychord, One Teen Story, Brooklyn Review and elsewhere, will appear at Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene on Wednesday, May 2 in conversation with journalist and author Heather Abel.  

When 11-year-old Deming Guo’s mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, fails to come home from work one day at the nail salon, he is left on his own. Adopted by two white college professors, he moves from the Bronx to upstate New York, where his name is changed to Daniel Wilkinson and his well-intentioned new parents try to give him an all-American life. But the boy, haunted by his mother’s disappearance and memories of all he has been forced to leave behind, struggles to embrace fully this new reality. Told from the perspective of both Daniel  — as he grows into a troubled young man — and Polly, the narrative unravels the unnerving mystery of Polly’s disappearance and the difficult choice she is forced to make.

“‘The Leavers’ was inspired by recent, real-life stories of undocumented immigrant women whose U.S.-born children were taken away from them and adopted by American families, while the women themselves were jailed or deported,” Ko says in an interview with Kingsolver. “It was this missionary-type attitude: We need to save these kids from their own culture and families. The kids are assimilable; the mothers are not. Today, we’re seeing more conscious efforts from adoptive parents to celebrate racial difference, rather than trying to ignore it. But choosing to adopt transracially as a symbol of diversity can be a kind of liberal racism in itself. With “The Leavers,” I want to decenter the narrative of transracial adoption away from that of the adoptive parents. Instead, we need to privilege the voices of adoptees, who are often missing from the conversation or dismissed as being bitter if they’re honest or critical about their experiences.”

Set in New York and China, “The Leavers” is a vivid examination of border and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past.

Ko is a co-founder of Hyphen and a fiction editor at Drunken Boat, and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the MacDowell Colony, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Writers OMI at Ledig House, the Jerome Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, the Van Lier Foundation, Hawthornden Castle, the I-Park Foundation, the Anderson Center, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She was born in Queens and raised in Jersey.

 

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