Mending Bodies Author Tour: Hon Lai Chu and Jacqueline Leung

Hon Lai Chu is one of Hong Kong’s most prominent writers and the author of several novels, including Mending Bodies, Degravitation Zone, and A Dictionary of Two Cities, co-authored with Dorothy Tse, which won the Hong Kong Book Prize. Her most recent works are Half-Eclipse and Darkness under the Sun, two diaristic essay collections about Hong Kong. She has also received accolades from Taiwan’s Unitas Literary Association, the Liang Shiu-chiu Literature Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award, and the Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature, among many others.

Jacqueline Leung is a writer and translator from Hong Kong. Her work has appeared in Wasafiri, Transtext(e)s Transcultures, Gulf Coast, Asymptote, Nashville Review, SAND Journal, the Asian Review of Books, Books From Taiwan, and elsewhere. She is a translator editor at The Offing. Her excerpt of Mending Bodies is a winner of PEN Presents by the English PEN. This is her first full-length translation.

Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023), winner of the Washington State book award. She also wrote two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Ucross, Loghaven, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. An interdisciplinary artist as well, she has exhibited her poetry installations and performances at the Frye Art Museum, Richmond Art Gallery, and the Asian Art Museum. She grew up in a take-out restaurant on the Jersey shore and is an Associate Professor at Western Washington University.

Claire Light is a Bay Area writer, cultural worker, and activist. She has worked since 1997 in nonprofit administration, particularly in arts and social justice, and was the founding director of APAture, an annual APIA artists festival, and a co-founder of Hyphen magazine. Her activism has turned most recently to disability justice, and she is co-founder of the Disability Justice League-Bay Area. You can read her fiction in McSweeney’s, Hyphen, and The Encyclopedia Project, among others. A short collection of her stories, Slightly Behind and to the Left, was published by Aqueduct Press in 2009. Her fantasy novel Monkey Around, written under the pen name Jadie Jang, was published by Solaris in 2021.

Lily Meyer is a translator and critic, and the author of the novel Short War. A contributing writer at The Atlantic, her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s story collections Little Bird and Ice for Martians. Her novel The End of Romance is forthcoming from Viking.

Bonnie Chau is a writer and translator from Southern California. Her short story collection All Roads Lead to Blood was a finalist for a 2019 CLMP Firecracker Award, and her writing has appeared in Flaunt, Two Lines, Fence, Bennington Review, Black Sun Lit, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction and literary translation, and has received fellowships from Kundiman, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, Black Mountain Institute, and the Stadler Center. She edits at Public Books, the Evergreen Review, and 4Columns; teaches creative writing and translation; and serves on the boards of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and Art Farm Nebraska.