SAN ANTONIO BOOK FESTIVAL
Women Around the World
About the Event
An upper-class Egyptian teenager pursues romance and personal freedom following the 1952 uprising in Dalia Azim’s novel Country of Origin. After being kidnapped and smuggled to California, a young Chinese woman tries to survive in late-19th-century America in Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s Four Treasures of the Sky. Two emerging voices talk about their debut novels which offer meaningful and varied views of our world.
About the Authors:
Dalia Azim’s work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Aperture, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Glimmer Train (where she received their Short Story Award for New Writers), Other Voices, Alcalde, and Sightlines, among other places. She lives in Austin, TX, where she is the manager of special projects at the Blanton Museum of Art. Previously she worked as a researcher at the Dedalus Foundation and as a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art. She graduated with a dual degree in art and literature from Stanford University and grew up in Canada and Colorado. She is the author of Country of Origin: A Novel.
Jenny Tinghui Zhang is a Chinese-American writer. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Apogee, Ninth Letter, Passages North, The Rumpus, HuffPost, The Cut, Catapult, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming and has received support from Kundiman, Tin House, and VONA/Voices. She was born in Changchun, China and grew up in Austin, Texas, where she currently lives. Four Treasures of the Sky is her debut.
Moderator: Andrew Porter
Andrew Porter is the author of three books, including the forthcoming short story collection, The Disappeared (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), the short story collection, The Theory of Light and Matter (Vintage/Penguin Random House), which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the novel, In Between Days (Alfred A. Knopf), which was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. Porter’s istories have appeared in The Pushcart Prize anthology, Ploughshares, One Story, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts, among others. Currently, he teaches fiction writing and directs the Creative Writing Program at Trinity University in San Antonio.