Ryan Lee Wong is author of the novel Which Side Are You On. He holds an MFA in fiction from Rutgers-Newark and has organized exhibitions on Asian American social movements. Before joining us for “How Does L.A. Inspire First-Time Novelists?”, he sat down with us in the green room to chat about L.A.’s Korean food, building a healthy relationship to writing, and the special tradition of Rohatsu.
Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi is a biomedical informatician and writer. Her book, a novel in stories, Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions, was published in September. Before participating in the Zócalo/ALOUD program …
It is said that Los Angeles lacks a literary pulse—that the flash and glam of Tinseltown overpowers the cultural terrain. But writers here deftly channel this city’s rhythms, spinning fictions …
It took until the cusp of middle age—the ripe age of 39—for me to write what would become my first book.
The spark for this new stage of my life was …
For all the puffy shirts, brooding glances, and implicit queerness of Interview with the Vampire, the blockbuster 1976 novel by the late Anne Rice that became the 1994 cult classic …
Leave it to Joan Didion. In her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” published in 1967, she identified a kind of slippage in our culture, the breakdown of collective narrative. “The center …
It is said that Los Angeles lacks a literary pulse—that the flash and glam of Tinseltown overpowers the cultural terrain. But writers here deftly channel this city’s rhythms, spinning fictions …
What happens when you bring together scientists and science fiction writers? Zócalo and the Arizona State University Center for Science and the Imagination brought physicist Lawrence M. Krauss and science …
Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, is generally considered the first work of science fiction. It explores, in scientific terms, the notion of synthetic life: Dr. Victor …
My grandfather, age 94, is in the hospital for a hip replacement. My grandmother, age 87, hasn’t visited him once. It’s been almost two weeks now.
Many of us dream of …
