The Dream Is Unreal: Novels on Chances and Last Chances
The American Dream means many different things to different people and these three novels examine the Dream and its consequences. (Pro tip: if you remember the Jeremy Lin moment then this panel is for you.)
About the authors
ROSANNA STAFFA is an Italian-born author. She received a Phd in Modern Foreign Languages from Universita’ Degli Studi in Milan and received an MFA at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. She is a Licensed Acupuncturist from the California Acupuncture College in Los Angeles and The Zhejiang College of Acupuncture in Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China. She is a member of The Loft Literary Center, the Italian Cultural Center in Minneapolis, and IAWA in New York. She is a Hedgebrook Alumna. READ MORE ABOUT ROSANNA
RAFAEL FRUMKIN is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Medill School of Journalism. His first novel, The Comedown, was published by Henry Holt in 2018 to critical acclaim. His Collection, Bugsy & Other Stories, is forthcoming. He lives with his partner, two cats, and one dog in Carbondale, Illinois, where he is an assistant professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University. READ MORE ABOUT RAFAEL
MATTHEW SALESSES is the author of The Sense of Wonder, national bestseller Craft in the Real World, the 2021 finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, and two other novels. Adopted from Korea, he has written about adoption, race, and Asian American masculinity in The Best American Essays 2020, NPR’s Code Switch, the New York Times blog Motherlode, and The Guardian, among other media outlets. BuzzFeed has named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. He lives in New York City, where he is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University. READ MORE ABOUT MATTHEW
About the Host
James Tate Hill is the author of a memoir, Blind Man’s Bluff (W. W. Norton), a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Book of 2021. His fiction debut, Academy Gothic, won the Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel. His fiction and nonfiction have been published by Lit Hub, Shondaland, Salon, Poets & Writers, and Prairie Schooner, among others, and his work has been listed as Notable in three editions of The Best American Essays. He serves as fiction editor for Monkeybicycle and contributing editor at Literary Hub, where he writes an audiobooks column.